The young man intended to purchase my death and, presumably and in some manner carry it away so that I never would meet with it. Immortality, wealth, my beloved Jessica all rotated in kaleidoscopic vision before my eyes. Editor’s Note: The following short story was left unpublished at the author’s death. Thomas Masty, the author’s [...]
Britannia & the Bear: The Anglo-Russian Intelligence Wars 1917-1929, by Victor Madeira (The Boydell Press, UK) Another cache of secret documents may not make forgotten history timelier than this. Modern asymmetrical confrontation truly began after 1914-1918, chiefly between Great Britain and what soon became the Soviet Union. While American troops tipped the balance and sailed home [...]
(Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Stephen Masty as he examines illiteracy and the death of books. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher) Never has the stock market soared higher nor the supply of affordable books been cheaper. Lucky or cursed, let us examine the latter–about which T.S. Eliot [...]
It is not every column that solves all of America’s problems, much less says how in a single piece of popular legislation, but the back-story comes first. As the headline already revealed, it shows how to “restrict the franchise”—a lawyerly, two-thousand bucks an hour phrase for limiting who can vote. Believe me, everyone will love [...]
You will need to wear your Indiana Jones fedora and stick with it, but I can promise you the big, Imaginative Conservative ending–with Russell Kirk on horseback, Christopher Dawson commanding the landing craft and Chesterton parachuting down from above as Elgar conducts the beachfront orchestra. Or something like that. Really. Our tale begins in a [...]
Spending little time in America nowadays but reading from afar, it has taken me years to understand her conservatives’ upset with diversity. It turned my American friends (at least the majority, conservatives) apoplectic, purple with rage and spluttering incomprehensibly. Anyone overhearing would have thought them idiots or stroke victims, or the hopelessly senile ranting about [...]
No, not all conspiracies are hallucinations, nor are all conspiracy theorists crazy or even libertarians. Here our sensible, responsible, even somewhat boring experts present the Top Ten Conspiracy Theories that everyone can trust. 1. Hillary Clinton is a Kleptomaniac You can see her here with her husband, after leaving Wal-Mart hiding a shoplifted ottoman in the [...]
It is not simply that carnivores eat meat—that hardly justifies the news headline*—nor that cute bears eat meat or even (cover your children’s eyes) kill other animals for the meat that they need rather than, say, buy it by the bucketful from KFC. That is not funny enough. This is—scientists have seen warm, cuddly, innocent, [...]
Far be it from us to strip down and leap into the hot-tub with Hegel and Lenin; and yet…and yet… there is an attraction to thoughts of historical inevitability. It seems as if Western collapse is a chain of unavoidable causes and effects, but this is a mistake. Unlike a lesser stage magician, its progenitor [...]
Wordsworth sang* to Milton, “thou shouldst be living at this hour,” and the same goes for G. K. Chesterton, the connoisseur of paradox. Weighing nearly four-hundred pounds at the end, today he would float like a dirigible over modern foreign affairs; plucking choice paradoxes at every hand and drawing as many lessons from our globalised Divine [...]
If you look carefully around your house you might see one, possibly under the bed; but most are probably invisible. A baku eats nightmares, human nightmares and all manner of bad dreams. He has a bear’s body, an elephant’s trunk, a tiger’s paws, an ox’s tail and rhinoceros eyes. “Oh! That baku!” you say, and [...]
“B-b-but, Lord Satan,” stammered the imp, reluctantly raising one claw to announce a question. Although he headed one of Hell’s most effective departments, technically speaking he was still an imp, and everyone knew what happened to the last one when the boss was in an exceptionally foul mood. “Our invention, called IT, shares knowledge but [...]
This is the story of three young men struggling for fame and fortune in the IT sector; finding one another and building a team, adapting the newest technology, injecting their own creativity, raising venture capital and applying painstaking effort, launching their product, outmanoeuvring competitors and rocketing to success—in the 15th Century! Parallels between the Early [...]
Even if never articulated we always felt that something was awry, summarized in the alleged Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times.” The heroes of most historians appear to be vainglorious killers among whom no sane soul would wish to live. Elsewhere a columnist considers the glamorous Charlemagne, under whom vicious wars raged from [...]