An entire nation that adopted a policy of pacifism would soon become a nation of slaves. Since the Christian religion has not yet become the exclusive preserve of fools, cowards, and idiots, it is strange how many people believe that Christ requires believers never to resist evil by force.
When I selected the first Bulldog Drummond for our ongoing discussion of books, it was partly because it is the kind of old-fashioned adventure that people like to read in the summer, and partly the author’s understand of certain fundamental things of life might remind readers of the “world we have lost.”
I posted the first part of this new essay in haste, because I felt a weakness coming on, but I have now revised and expand the first part and added a second.
This is a slightly corrected Perspective on Afghanistan published in 2010:
“to me the most wonderful thing of all is that so wise and wealthy a nation could have ever entertained the project of occupying such a country as Kabul, where there is nothing but rocks and stones.
Biden’s performance as commander-in-chief is disastrous, but let us never forget that George Bush and his team of aspiring world-controlers had no valid reason for invading and destroying this rotten country–as I said before the invasion–and the only exit strategy that seemed likely is what is happening now
If you are unwise enough to be on one or another social medium, you will have read something like this: “If you want to disagree with my futile ill-thought out and clumsily expressed opinion on X Y or Z, go ahead and make my day. I can’t wait to unfriend you”? Do you ever wonder what is going on in someone’s mind, when he issues such a taunt? I automatically unfriend such people, even if I agree with their position. I no longer have to teach low-achieving American adolescents with exaggerated opinions of themselves. I am speaking of the early...
In reading fiction, especially fiction of the lighter sorts, readers are tempted to see the characters in abstract terms as straw men or lay figures invented to play a part or represent an idea, a virtue, or a vice.
McNeile’s plots follow the well-worn highway of adventure fiction, The plot of the first is particularly formulaic.
“L’enfers c’est l’autre.” Whatever Sartre meant by “Hell is other people,” he was certainly right about the people he liked to refer to as “salaud”—the scum who think only of their own interests and reduce the universe to their own dimensions, in other words, people like Sartre and his friends.
And now for something completely different! Since Polish novelists and ancient historians have proved to be too daunting or time-consuming for most readers, I am taking a different tack and devoting a few days to Bite of the Bulldog (initially titled simply Bulldog Drummond), a short thriller in which the reader meets one of the great pop fiction heroes of the last century, Bulldog Drummond.
