Monthly Archives: September 2016

  Perhaps the most famous piece of stage direction in Western literature occurs in the third act of Shakespeare’s classic play “The Winter’s Tale: “Exit pursued by a bear.” There’s plenty of reason to think that being pursued by a bear, the … Continue reading →

You have to wonder at the political desperation that gave birth to Mr. Runciman’s essay. Just call it chatter! One could compare it to the Party Line of The Financial Times’ ‘The Rebellion Against The Elites’ which appears in its … Continue reading →

In his review/essay of ‘Tiny Alice’ Mr. Roth presents his case against Mr. Albee in full heterosexual defensiveness as he attacks the closeted playwright as literary type, as well as a writer. Compare this first quoted paragraph which uses this … Continue reading →

https://theintercept.com/2016/09/13/colin-powell-emails/ This is very interesting in terms of palace gossip and as Foreign Policy chatter, but this quote from Powell demonstrates the myth of his political ‘virtue’ in the starkest terms : ‘Powell added in a tangential complaint: “I told … Continue reading →

Opus Dei’s Ross Douthat is way out of his usual territory: the hectoring chatter about sexual morality, directed to the liberated women of America, who feel they don’t need the tutelage of one more stupid straight white male, offering censure … Continue reading →

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-impartial-spectator-9780199568260?cc=us&lang=en&#

J.G.A. Pocock offers some telling insights in his essay of  1992, in a collection published in 1996 by Verso, on the ‘Question of Europe’ in his essay of the same name, in this collection of essays of the same title. … Continue reading →

America abounds in Political Romantics who long for a halcyon past.Even if they have to invent that past. What it comes down to is a longing, in many American Conservatives, for the year 1859 just before the Civil War, when … Continue reading →

I had a sense of déjà vu as I read Mr. Luce’s column. Except that he seemed to echo David Brooks, who dons, at his political convenience, the mantle of popular sociologist,  political prophet and/or national moral scold. Sometimes all … Continue reading →

Never fear we are in the ‘safe space’ once inhabited by the paranoid chatter of Allen Bloom of ‘The Closing of The American Mind’ and his two Neo-Conservative allies: Dinesh D’Souza’s ‘Illiberal Education’ and Roger Kimball’s ‘Tenured Radicals: How Politics … Continue reading →