Can we fail to see the significance of Hamlet’s last words, “the rest is silence,” uttered immediately before Horatio’s prayer from the Requiem Mass? Since "requiem" means “rest” in Latin, can we avoid the suspicion that Shakespeare is alluding to the “something rotten” in the state of England which has silenced the Requiem Mass and [...]
Newman’s conversion in 1845, sixteen years after Catholic Emancipation and five years before the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England, heralded the birth of a Revival which would see the resurrection of the Faith in the English-speaking world. In September 2010, I was honoured to be invited to serve as an official commentator on [...]
One of the most egregious examples of the dissemination of the false narrative of fake history is the bias and inaccuracy of the “official” history of England since the time of the Reformation. William Cobbett We live in an age when fake news is rampant. Yet fake news is nothing new. It’s been [...]
Perhaps, when we survey the splendour of the literary legacy of the British Isles, we should remind ourselves that the one golden rule is that there was not one golden age. Instead, and glory of glories, from the time of the Anglo-Saxons until the most recent of times, one golden age has simply made way [...]
What the faith of the Catholic Church can offer is a framework—intellectual, imaginative, and moral—for the pursuit of all the good that pertains to human destiny, and its effective bestowal in the grace of conversion. The Church civilizes while she evangelizes. But she evangelizes first. Secularisation is far more of a challenge to Christianity in [...]
The Church is not prison but liberation. It is the way of escape—from the cell of the self, from the solipsist nightmare, from the grubbiness of materialism, from the overwhelming fact, in every age, of sin and sorrow. The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh, by Father Ian Ker [...]
Even though President James Monroe could not fix the economy or dismiss the Missouri question, he could certainly distract the nation from its problems. In his second inaugural address, he gleefully announced a new target for American anger: The British were not allowing free trade between the United States and the English-occupied West Indies. Whatever [...]
Like their British counterparts, the American Jacobites bitterly criticized the damage done to the working class and cities by the industrial system and listening to their neo-feudal critiques one sees similarities with Progressivism and Populism. While these latter movements analyzed from the perspective of the political left, the Jacobites did so from the political right. [...]
As the gulf between classical and postmodern notions of conscience and government grows ever wider and their clashes more explosive, it is high time for the jury to give renewed attention to the nuances of Thomas More’s understanding of the apparently competing, but ultimately harmonious, demands of divine, natural, and human law. In August of [...]
Despite their obscurity, “The Rape of Lucrece” and “Venus and Adonis” were Shakespeare’s best-sellers. But why were these poems so wildly popular? Shadowplay, by Clare Asquith, 370 pages, PublicAffairs, 2018) In Shadowplay—her first book about the secret messages in Shakespeare’s plays—Clare Asquith explains what sparked first her imagination and then her research: In the early [...]
The Red Rose Revolution brought about by Princess Diana's tragic death was a triumph of sentimentality over reality. In the intervening twenty-five years, that sentimentality has prevailed in England, sweeping away the sterling values that had been the hallmark of English character. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I have watched the most recent [...]
Apart from the breathtaking beauty of his musical compositions, it is the ethos of Butterworth that attracts me. He was rooted in the soil and soul of England and enamoured of its shires. He was a true localist before the word was invented, the very antithesis of the modern and modish cosmopolitan. If I should [...]
In his "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard," Thomas Gray wrote a great, sometimes mystifying and troubling poem, and, where the pastoral impulse is concerned, an admonishing one. No one born after the French Revolution, said the durable Talleyrand, can know how sweet life can be. This sentiment was quoted in his book about Metternich by [...]
Perhaps it could be argued that the English monarch is nothing but an effectively powerless figurehead and that, therefore, his or her words are of little consequence. The real power resides with Parliament, not with the Monarch. Not so, I would reply. Or at least not necessarily so. I honestly cannot remember the last time [...]