The Shortest Way With Defoe – Robinson Crusoe, Deism, and the Novel Michael B. Prince, University of Virginia Press, 2020, 328 pages, £26 Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel Journal of the Plague Year has been much read recently, for obvious reasons. Cognoscenti have always read Roxana and Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, while… Continue reading
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Epitome of his generation
Thanks A Lot Mr Kibblewhite Roger Daltrey, London: Blink, 2018, hb., 345 pages, £20 In 1839, the topographer Thomas Faulkner found the little Middlesex village of Shepherd’s Bush a “pleasant” rustic retreat, centred on quiet Gagglegoose Green – an outlier of the once highwayman-haunted Hounslow Heath. Today, the pleasant settlement is a dubious London suburb,… Continue reading
Scruton’s last words on Wagner’s last work
Wagner’s Parsifal – The Music of Redemption Roger Scruton, Allen Lane, 2020, 208 pages, hb, £20 Parsifal was Wagner’s last opera, staged at Bayreuth less than a year before he died. It is therefore sadly suitable as the subject of Roger Scruton’s last book. Parsifal was inspired by the early 13th century German epic, Parzival,… Continue reading
Deep mining
The Dominant Animal, Kathryn Scanlan, Daunt Books, 2020, 118 pages, £9.99 Iowa-born Kathryn Scanlan emerged onto the literary scene in 2019 with Aug 9 – Fog, which took the found, real diary of an octogenarian stranger and turned it into an oddly poetical meditation on ‘ordinary’ life and mortality. The Dominant Animal is made up… Continue reading
Corona Humours VIII – O how the mighty are falling!
In 2 Samuel, King David laments the deaths of Saul and Jonathan: The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places; how are the mighty fallen! The chapter came to mind as I saw the reports about the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, the removal of Robert Milligan from the West… Continue reading
Traditionalism redux
War for Eternity – Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, New York: Dey Street Books, 2020, pb, 315 pages Many critics have made attacks on President Trump and his intellectual influences, but Benjamin Teitelbaum is cleverer and fairer-minded than most. War for Eternity strives to show that many modern national… Continue reading
Apparitions and appropriations
‘The dead shall look me through and through’ Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H. As a boy, I read excitedly about the Egyptian Rooms at the British Museum, where night watchmen reported unexplained drops in temperature, feelings of being watched, and, on at least one occasion, a terrifying apparition of a bandage-clad mummy with contorted… Continue reading
The very human history of Holy Writ
The History of The Bible John Barton, Allen Lane, 2020, 622 pages, £9.99 Western civilization is inconceivable without The Bible. Its assumptions, language and metaphors resound through our activities and imaginations, even if we think we have rejected religion as superstition. But how did the Bible develop from folkloric Near Eastern origins to today’s omnipresence?… Continue reading
Call of the wild
Losing Eden – Why Our Minds Need the Wild Lucy Jones, Allen Lane, 2020, 272 pages, £14 Since the start of civilization, jaded townspeople have dreamed of escaping from the city and reconnecting with nature. In this highly personal but also well-informed study, Lucy Jones demonstrates that this is not just a sentimental yearning, but… Continue reading
Corona Humours VII – Paracelsus – from alchemy to chymistry
I am not intrinsically interested in health. It is part selfish complacency, but I have always felt that a society morbidly interested in healthcare is one lacking an essential confidence – one that is half-hypochondrical, self-pitying, querulously conscious of growing old while sorely missing old religious consolations. So to me the ongoing Corona saga is… Continue reading