Credit: Shutterstock PETER KING says inconsistency is not incoherency We live in fragments. There is nothing that is so large to be all encompassing. There is nothing that is dominant, nothing that is the essence. Of course, we humans are common in our biology, psychology and our mortality, but this is not what defines us…
This is the opening extract from a hitherto unknown chapter of Gulliver’s Travels, as discovered by GUY WALKER. The full version is here I continued at home with my Wife and Children about Five Months in a very happy condition, if I could have learned the Lesson of knowing when I was well. I left…
The Good and Evil Angels, by William Blake LUKE GILFEDDER examines the differences – and parallels – between two original thinkers In 1956 Colin Wilson published The Outsider, an overnight literary sensation which saw the 24-year-old autodidact hailed as a prodigy and the first home-grown British existentialist. He sent a copy to T.S. Eliot, who,…
Credit: Shutterstock How to Stop Fascism Paul Mason, Allen Lane, 256 Pages, £20 KEN BELL finds a noted Labour intellectual fighting an imaginary enemy Paul Mason is one of those interesting characters who now seem to pop up everywhere, telling the rest of us what to believe. In his student days he was a member…
Credit: Shutterstock GUY WALKER calls for a realistic view of humanity’s record Earlier this year a Palace coup at the National Trust saw the Chairman, Tim Parker, helpfully defenestrate himself before the pursuing Imperial Guard did it for him. The revolting soldiery were later in hot pursuit, through the gilded corridors, of the Director-General, Hilary…
Chips and Honor Channon Henry “Chips” Channon, Diaries Vol. 2, 1938-1943 Edited by Simon Heffer, Hutchinson, 1,120 Pages, £35 KEN BELL renews his acquaintance with the famous Tory diarist The Conservative MP and socialite, Henry “Chips” Channon, was a brilliant writer with an acid wit who also had an amazing capacity to misunderstand the people…
On the Cusp: Days of ’62 David Kynaston, Bloomsbury, 239 P, £18.99 KEN BELL admires a study of 1962, but wonders why that year was singled out for attention David Kynaston must be the premier social historian of post-war Britain writing today, and his latest book is a fine, standalone work which really captures the…
Still from 'The Cruel Sea' (1953) STUART MILLSON revels in British film music at the Proms It seems unthinkable that a Proms season in peacetime would have to be abandoned, but this is almost what happened last year at the height of the Covid pandemic. With much-reduced orchestras – their players spread widely across an…
Credit: Wikimedia Commons R. J. STOVE remembers a classic work of anti-travel literature So far as Anglo-American relations are concerned I have always felt that they would probably have been better had the two nations spoken different languages. In the latter years of the eighteenth century there was a school of thought which held that…
Credit: Shutterstock The New Snobbery David Skelton, Biteback Publishing, 253 pp, £16.99 KEN BELL says many members of the middle classes have found ingenious new ways of disliking people Britain is notoriously obsessed with class, but now there is a new, ideological way of looking down on people. David Skelton, a native northeasterner who is…