Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
In The Spiritualist Medium: A Study of Female Professionalism in Victorian America (1975), R. Laurence Moore of Cornell wrote: In his journal, [Ralph Waldo] Emerson included the spiritualist medium among the new professions that he believed had emerged in America…
Prince Platon Shirinsky-Shikhmatov (1790-1853) served as Nicholas I’s minister of education in 1850-53, during some of the darkest years of that reign. Disturbed by the European revolutions of 1848-9, Nicholas succumbed to a sort of reactionary paranoia that debilitated all…
In 1809, Byron wrote a friend from Lisbon : I must just observe, that the village of Cintra in Estramadura is the most beautiful, perhaps, in the world. We also find an expression of this in Child Harold’s Pilgrimage: Lo! Cintra’s glorious…
Reviewing To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture by Eleonory Gilburd, Jennifer Wilson writes in The New Republic: According to the nineteenth-century philosopher Georgy Fedotov, “a unified Europe had more reality on the banks of the…
Late in April, Rwanda’s Supreme Court struck down a law criminalizing “defamation, insults and cartooning public officials” but upheld the clause that made insulting the president a crime. (In addition, the court refused to decriminalize adultery.) Specifically, Article 154 criminalizes…
Robert Messenger reviews a collection of Philip Larkin’s letters to his mother, his sister, his lovers and others. Along the way, Messenger quotes a presumably autobiographical note by Larkin first published in Andrew Motion’s biography of the poet: My mother,…
Karen Allen reported from Madagascar earlier this month: The three Russians who landed on the Indian Ocean Island of Madagascar showed a curious interest in church architecture when they arrived months before the 2018 presidential election… But their particular interest…
In a letter to the London Review of Books, Maxwell Young argues: While ‘godly’ is an adjective few would apply to Trump himself, Vice President Mike Pence and other Trump appointees demonstrate the continuing potency of religion as a political…
Alfred de Vigny, the author of The Bottle to the Sea (La bouteille à la mer) and La frégate La Sérieuse, was not a man of the sea. He served in the French army – mostly with the royal guard…
Georges Barthouil on Leopardi’s attitude to travel: Leopardi was not a great traveller. In fact he imagined his foreign travels… Surely he had long wanted to escape his ancestral prison at Recanati in the Marches: However, escaping from a prison…
George Eaton’s dubious account, in the New Statesman, of his interview with Roger Scruton begins with this paragraph: It was in Paris in May 1968, as French workers and students revolted, that Roger Scruton became a conservative. “I was woken…
Neal Ascherson wrote in the New York Review of Books in 2017: The parliamentary sovereignty dogma was enshrined by the great Victorian jurist A.V. Dicey. But, funnily enough, Dicey changed his mind about referendums at the end of his life.…