• The Daily Telegraph
• Le Figaro
• The New York Post
• L’Orient-Le Jour
• L'Osservatore Romano
• The Irish Times
• Conservative Home
• The Jewish Chronicle

• FAZ / Eng.
• NZZ / Eng.
• Magyar Nemzet
• ABC.es
• The Catholic Herald
• Il Foglio
• London Playbook
• Financial Times

France

Mitteleuropa

Knickerbockers

Argentina

The Levant

Africa

Cape of Good Hope

Netherlands

Scandinavia

Québec

India

Muscovy

Germany

Luttwak first came to my attention when, about 10 or 11 years old, I was given a copy of Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook (I think one of the many I received from my relation Henry, R.I.P.). He has been interesting at every turn I have had to read him or his thoughts ever since.

Santi Ruiz of Statecraft has released a delicious new interview with Luttwak.

“Coups had been very common until about two years after the book was published, and then stopped,” Luttwak contends. “The reason is that authorities everywhere reverse-engineered the book. The book was published in English, and it was immediately translated into about 13 languages. It went all over the place. I think what happened is that people learned to reverse engineer.”

He relates the story of Gen. Oufkir’s attempted coup against Hassan II of Morocco: “Oufkir bled to death, and he did so over a copy of my book.”

Luttwak’s explanation of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s manipulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to assert racial dominance over the Arabs is sharp.

■ Ever since school days, we are Argentinophiles. The Financial Times, of all people, has a helpful “long read” examining the surprising successes of President Javier Milei.

■ Dr Katherine Bayford writes on the rift that doomed the American Confederacy.

■ Dan Hitchens reviews the film ‘Conclave’.

■ Niall Gooch is always reliable on railways. He compares Britain’s rail woes with the experience of our continental neighbours and concludes that we are still in for difficulties:

Culture is just so hard to prod in a positive direction; people get stuck in their ways, and find it hard to move the assumptions and perspectives which dominate beyond the station forecourt. Yet, shifting the dial isn’t impossible, if the will is there, and this is yet another arena in which British offerings can improve.

■ The prospective — all though not yet assured — loss of London’s Smithfields Market is a portent of doom for the metropolis, Sebastian Milbank prophesies.

One day, I believe, we will have to reclaim London for England, and create an economics of human flourishing rather than of usurious speculation and rent-seeking.

He is right, of course, and I think this will happen, but the English are slow movers and our political class is pretty immured from the ideas and thinking going on below.

The emerging consensus hasn’t yet reached up to those actually making decisions, and it may be five or ten years before it does. Much more damage can be done in the mean time.

■ “Turning back the clock is proverbially impossible in history,” Wessie du Toit writes, “but apparently not in architecture.” An exploration of the architectural ambitions of Viktor Orban.

■ We are well into the preparatory tide of Advent. The ever-estimable Eleanor Parker reminds of Conditor Alme Siderum, one of the office hymns of this season.

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