At first glance there are simply too many exceptions to prove the rule. Take Emily Dickinson, a woman of transcendent genius who dreamed up a whole new language of English poetry, too advanced for our age to find any proper understanding or creative use. If anybody knows anything at all about Dickinson, it’s that she was a hermit, living at a remove from urban civilization and the cultural milieu it nourished.
This is an old story – exactly two years old, to be exact – but I completely missed it when it was unfolding, and something tells me the gentle reader was likewise napping even as mischievous Pan was sounding his pipes. In June 2016 the Alps played host to a variety of dignitaries, including Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Francois Hollande, and Italy’s Matteo Renzi, at the opening ceremony for the $10 billion St. Gotthard tunnel, at 57 kilometers through solid rock the world’s longest and most ambitious. This six-hour-long theatrical spectacle had been choreographed by a German called Volker Hesse,...
I had intended to stay out of politics for a while, what with the Sicilian peach season in full swing and all the rest of nature’s palliatives to hand, but then it occurred to me that unless I have my say on this particular subject, nobody in the whole wide world will. It’s really the question of the century, as far as I’m concerned, and consequently I find few things more astonishing than the unbroken silence surrounding it.
What do I know about Jehovah’s Witnesses? Nothing, naturally, as do most of my readers, I suspect.
In short, something like a late Romantic. Had Pasternak been born in England, he would now be remembered as the culmination of Romanticism, a poet taking to modern extreme that “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” which, famously, Wordsworth mentions in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. And politics, it would seem, had as little to do with any of this as automobile manufacturing or Olympic sports. Yet this was the same poet who, aged 41 in 1931, published an autobiography entitled Okhrannaya gramota, its title usually, and not incorrectly, translated into English as Safe Conduct. In speaking of a man who,...
Frank Brownlow’s post of a few days ago has made me want to continue the discussion it began, but the truth is, it ain’t simple. I’m at a disadvantage, because Dr. Brownlow’s is an eagle’s eye view of the paradox of culture under totalitarianism, whereas what I want to respond with is a worm’s eye view of the underlying evidentiary base
They say that truth will always out in the end, but the truth is that awls can be hidden in sackcloth for generations. Take the ordinary umbrella – the kind without a poisoned tip – and tell me honestly if a more ineffectual contraption has ever existed; and yet no wife, mother, or grandmother ever neglects to remind the man of the house to avail himself of one whenever it looks like rain. In London, of course, it always does. Rain has a mind of its own, which is called wind, and consequently, however large the umbrella, within ten minutes...
I met Badri Patarkatsishvili once, in a nightclub where I was taken by Boris Berezovsky. With Berezovsky himself I’d had a cordial relationship going back to the first days of his flight to Britain. Sasha Litvinenko I also met once, at the famous press conference he gave in London about his book, banned in Russia in 2003 and since 2015 on the Federal Roster of Extremist Materials
Like a young father who can’t keep himself from telling everyone it’s a boy, or – to put a current events spin on it – like Western politicians who have been shown that the arms control agreements they negotiated were unverifiable and never observed by the other side, I’m still reeling from the news I shared here last week.
I wrote for Tom Fleming for the better part of thirty years. In all that time, here as elsewhere, I never asked my editor to bless a sketch or an essay that raised the spectre of self-promotion, or for that matter of any other kind of base interest or material gain. One might almost think I was biding my time, waiting for the right moment to pounce on my readers. Well, I’m afraid I have some bad news, ladies and gentlemen. That moment has come.
