Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
The Belgium that Sergei Soloviev admired in the 1840s was mostly Francophone or aspiring to fluency in French. At that time, Wallonia was the dynamic, industrialized, fast-growing part of the country while Flanders was less advanced and more agricultural. More…
One of the two protagonists in Atomized by Michel Houellebecq reminisces: Oh, maybe I felt a little sad—but in a very general sort of way. “God Himself cannot undo that which has been done,” as some Catholic writer said somewhere.…
Two poems by D. H. Lawrence, Bitterness of Death (1916) and A Woman and Her Dead Husband (1917), begin the same, except for a comma: Ah, stern, cold man,How can you lie so relentless hardWhile I wash you with weeping water! I’m probably not…
Consider the following statements. Thelonious Monk was a musician. Bob Dylan is a musician. Technically, (2) as true as (1) as long as a person who makes a living singing songs and playing a musical instrument is a musician. On the…
Another extract from Sergei M. Soloviev’s Notes for My Children and for Others, If Possible concerning the historian’s sojourn in Europe in 1842-44. (Earlier selections: on Belgium, on alternating bald and hairy rulers; on Count Uvarov, the author of the A-O-N triad.)…
If my calculations are correct, 37.4% of the eligible voters voted for Brexit in June and 39.7% of the eligible voters voted for Orbán’s immigration proposal last Sunday. However, the turnout for the Brexit referendum was 72%, with 52% voting…
Sergei M. Soloviev (or Solovyov; 1820-1879), the prominent Russian historian, graduated from the Moscow University in 1842 and spent the next two years traveling in Europe. The journey was made possible by his employment as the tutor to the children…
Alexei K. Tolstoy wrote A Mutiny in Vatican in 1864: The Castrati have rebelled.They walk into the Pope’s chambers:“Why aren’t we married?What’s our fault?” The Pope suggests “patching” his singers with cotton tissue, to which they object that the missing…
At some point I got the feeling The Economist had become a sort of Reader’s Digest written by Oxbridge PPE/SPS graduates. But low expectations multiply the chances for a positive surprise, like this: Its [the Alt-Right’s] more cerebral fellow-travelers reheat…
Rachel Cooke claims in a book review in The Guardian: German writer Norman Ohler’s astonishing account of methamphetamine addiction in the Third Reich changes what we know about the second world war. To some of us, it is not news…
The Cultural Revolution began fifty years and six months ago, in May 1966. Paul Berman writes of Mao’s admirers in France and America: The flower of French intellectual life—Sartre, Foucault, and many others—aligned themselves with the Maoist cause in the…
H. L. Mencken wrote in The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1913) regarding the philosopher’s radical vegetarianism and belief in “natural methods of healing”: Nietzsche had read Emerson in his youth, and those Emersonian seeds which have come to full flower…