Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
The Great Terror
(by Robert Conquest) It is hard to understand why so many intelligent people admired the socialist experiment of Soviet Union c. 1934-1940. These useful idiots defended and lauded systematic mass slaughter on an industrial scale. Conquest’s book, originally appearing in 1968, helped convince those still impervious to, inter alia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The case is made, with solid and well sourced evidence, that Stalin basically topped anyone who looked at him sideways, or didn’t look at him, or whatever. Nor were the good and great spared: my battered 1971 Pelican edition has, as Appendix D, a list of Full and…
Continue Reading →God’s Funeral
Hardy is dead, but is God?
(by A.N. Wilson) A beautiful & rich review of Victorian and Edwardian thinking, as God’s life support was unplugged and how later generations may come, in time, to feel the need to apply resuscitation. As Kenneth Clark observed, heroic materialism and Marxism aren’t enough. We need something more.
Continue Reading →The Glass Bead Game
(by Hermann Hesse) Hesse’s ideation of his own life as a monk is a heavy but worthwhile read.
Continue Reading →The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress
(by Beryl Bainbridge) An odd, slight, oddly touching and slightly naff story of a road trip to oblivion, culminating in the death of RFK; but is the dysfunctional, libidinous Rose ‘the girl in the polka dot dress’ who exclaimed, ‘We shot him!’ as reported in the LA Times on 6 June 1968? Bainbridge’s last, almost finished novel is, unlike The Original of Laura, worth reading.
Continue Reading →The General Strike
(by Julian Symons) 13 May 1926 – the General Strike in Britain ended this day. People thought Marxism was through in Britain as a result but like Mao in exile, it would return. Calling a strike requires keen judgment because the reaction of the public as a whole might be sympathetic, hostile, or mixed. One example is the pilots’ strike in Australia in 1989, which resulted in the pilots, and their union, being blown out of the sky. Another famous campaign was the Miners’ strike of the mid 1980s in England, when organized labour found out that the majority of the…
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