Category: Fleming
Loyalty Oafs
This is my article on Forster from The Spectator. The title was given by an editor, probably Stuart Reid.
A Life in Shreds and Patches: Greatness Almost Thrust Upon Me, Part I
This is a slightly fictionalized piece of personal history. Some of the names have been changed to protect the sensitive, and the dialogue, while it represents the substance of what was said, has been sharpened by recollection.
Two Winter Poems
The first is by Robert Louis Stevenson…. The second is by Thomas Hardy There will be more.
“What A Country!”
This morning my wife asked me why Gavin Newsome has been behaving so foolishly in public. “That’s easy,” I told her, “He’s watching Donald Trump and picking up cues.”
Autodidact–Shakespeare and Greek Tragedy, Hamlet
Hamlet is, like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, a death-obsessed neurotic, and the similarities between the play and the film must have given Franco Zeferelli the brilliant (if zany) idea of casting Gibson, a morally unstable movie star of limited talent, as Hamlet.
Shall/Will and Should/Would
Nothing better indicates the mental confusion of postmodern Americans than their constant abuse of modal auxiliary verbs like shall and will, should and would, can and could. In introducing the Italian conditional, I included the following preface which may help some to understand how future and conditional are formed in English.
Studying War: Toward A Workable Just War Theory, Proem
War, much like marriage, is a necessary institution that responds to human need. Sexual desire and the impulse to violence—which can be fueled by cupidity—are both part of the human condition. In a state of nature, unfortunately, human needs are fulfilled without ceremony: rape, promiscuous sex, and incest, in the case of sexual desire, and raiding parties, looting expeditions, ambushes, and genocidal mass murders, in the case of violence.
