• The Daily Telegraph
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• L’Orient-Le Jour
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• The Irish Times
• Conservative Home
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• FAZ / Eng.
• NZZ / Eng.
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• ABC.es
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France

Mitteleuropa

Knickerbockers

Argentina

The Levant

Africa

Cape of Good Hope

Netherlands

Scandinavia

Québec

India

Muscovy

Germany

The Lebanese banker, writer, journalist, and politician Michel Chiha postulated that Beirut was “the axis of a three-pronged propeller: Africa, Asia and Europe”.

The city’s current airport was inaugurated in 1954, towards the height of its golden years.

In L’Orient-Le Jour, Lyana Alameddine and Soulayma Mardam-Bey report on how Beirut Airport’s story reflects the highs and lows of Lebanon’s history. (Aussi en français.)

■ Another one bites the dust: this time it’s London’s Evening Standard — traditionally the most London of London’s daily newspapers — which recently announced it will move to a single weekly printed edition.

In its heyday there were several editions per day, with “West End Final” on rare occasions topped up by a “News Extra” edition.

Stuart Kuttner, a veteran of the Standard, wrote a beautiful paean to the paper published in the Press Gazette.

■ Samuel Rubinstein shows how historians’ war of words over the legacy of the British Empire tells us more about the moral battles of today than shedding actual light on the past.

■ Wessie du Toit explores the curious columnar classicism persistent across the full spectrum of South African architecture.

■ With union presidents speaking at America’s Republic party convention, Senator Josh Hawley explores the promise of pro-labour conservatism.

■ Also at the increasingly indispensible Compact, Pablo Touzon explores how the Argentine left created Javier Milei.

■ Closer to home, Guy Dampier argues that Britain’s public services, housing, and infrastructure have reached their migration breaking point and the new Government has zero solutions.

■ Meanwhile, five hundred academics have signed a joint letter urging the Labour government not to scrap university free speech laws as the Education Secretary announced they will do.

British right-liberals are sometimes accused of yearning for “Singapore-on-Thames” but they would, for example, recoil from the state-backed housebuilding that Singapore relies on.

The indomitable Lola Salem visited the flourishing Straits state.

“In everyday life,” she writes, “the state endeavours to demonstrate its relevance and ensure citizens feel that they have a stake in what is achieved in their name.”

But the foundation of Singapore’s undeniable strengths is “a complex tapestry of trade-offs that Western leaders wilfully or inadvertently ignore.”

■ Romania is a delight to visit, but I have only been to Transylvania which is somehow another category entirely. A bit like if you’ve been to Britain, but only (“only”) Scotland.

Christopher Brunet says that Romanians themselves tell foreigners to visit Transylvania and avoid their own capital city. He decided to do the opposite and spent a month as a boulevardier in Bucharest.

Brunet reports back that Romania is quietly doing great.

■ Without meaning to damn with faint praise, David Warren is one of the great Canadians of our age. I long felt an almost spiritual connection to him but, though we have never met in person, I assuaged myself that we were at least infrequent correspondents.

One day I went to check when was the last email I had from him only to be surprised to find that I had never, in fact, corresponded with him at all. So I wrote to him and told him this, which provoked a reply saying that he too had assumed we had written to one another several times. Two mastodons bellowing across primieval swamps, or the Atlantic ocean, or the Canadian border when I was still in New York.

Amongst David’s many accomplishments was the foundation and editorship of The Idler (1985-1993), the greatest Canadian magazine ever printed. Canada generously shovels endless cash at its literary efforts in the hope of producing something homegrown that can survive the onslaught of popular culture from its peaceful neighbours to the south.

Despite critical acclaim and obvious excellence, The Idler’s unfashionable conservatism meant that it never had access to the largesse distributed by the Canada Council for the Arts. As that body funded 96 different publications, David branded The Idler as “Canada’s 97th best literary magazine”.

David writes about his experience editing the review that described its ideal reader as “a sprightly, octogenarian spinster with a drinking problem, and an ability to conceal it”.

■ Edinburgh was the site of the second-most venerable legislature in the English-speaking world, and it is worth wending a wander into Old Parliament Hall — one of the city’s three parliament buildings.

We’re all familiar with the way the House of Commons sits, having inherited the antiphonal seating of the old Chapel Royal of St Stephen in the Palace of Westminster.

At Old Edinburgh Reborn, Dr Robert Sproul-Cran has penned a very thorough examination of how seating was arranged in the Estaits of the Realm, the Scots parliament of old.

■ It would take a heart of stone not to be amused by the life and times of King Zog of Albania. He may have been a vulgar gangster but he had a certain flair, and one appreciates the imaginative even when it is self-aggrandising.

Daniel Marc Janes reviews a new book about the Illyrian potentate.

(And if you haven’t read the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, you should.)

■ The sheer freakishness of American campus life is as fascinating as it is alarming.

The universities of the United States are some of the most influential factors of social control in the world, and whatever weird innovations you experience in your professional or public life worldwide today are usually explained by something that was going on at Yale or Stanford five or ten years before.

Ginevra Davis has written a sad chronicle of Stanford University’s war against social life. They even let an artificial lake go dry to stop people enjoying it!

■ What is more satisfying than the brilliant self-taught amateur who outshines the experts?

John Steele Gordon writes about the great astronomer E.E. Barnard.

■ A new documentary film about South Korea’s founding father, Rob York reports, has led to a newfound appreciation of the much-maligned Syngman Rhee.

■ I am a fan of the neglected postwar American conservative thinker Peter Viereck, and of course everyone is a fan of Metternich. (Viereck was previously mentioned here in January thanks to Samuel Rubinstein.)

Hamilton Craig covers both figures in his suggestion of how Yoram Hazony’s “NatCon” conferences can learn from Austria’s greatest chancellor.

■ I recently wrote about Telephone Kiosk No. 2, but Clive Aslet does it better.

■ Mary Harrington claims that conservatism is dead and the future belongs to right-wing progressives like Bukele.

■ Whoever Pimlico Journal is says we need to stop valorising dead centrist Tories.

■ And it turns out that the role of Patriarch of Constantinople is actually an arms-length Langley job. (Caveat emptor.)

My then-flatmate was getting married the next day and much pottering-about sorting things was required but the idiosyncratic beauty of this building captured my imagination — part Norman, part Moorish. I was almost insulted that I hadn’t come across it in any of my bookish explorations.

The historian Edmund Harris covers Chideock in his lusciously illustrated post on Recusancy in Dorset and the ‘other tradition’ of Catholic church-building.

■ Generations ago it was said that the three institutions no British politician dared offend were the trade unions, the Catholic Church, and the Brigade of Guards. In 2020s Britain there is only one caste which must always be obeyed: the ageing, moneyed homeowners.

Not only do these “NIMBYs” (“Not In My Back Yard”) jealously guard their freeholds, they do whatever they can to prevent more houses being built to guard the value of their prize possessions, vastly inflated by a combination of lacklustre housebuilding and irresponsible leap in migration. As old people vote and young people don’t — and when they do, vote badly — few sensible people can find a way out of this quagmire.

It might be worth looking to the Mediterranean, where Tal Alster tells us How Israel turned urban homeowners into YIMBYs.

■ It’s disappointingly rare to see intelligent outsiders give a considered impression of the current state of play in the Netherlands — that’s Mother Holland for us New Yorkers. Too often commentators in English are either rash cheerleaders for the hard right or bien-pensant liberals eager to castigate and chastise. Both rush to judgement.

What a rare diversion then to read Christopher Caldwell — the only thinking neo-con? — attempt to explore and explain the success of Geert Wilders in the recent Dutch elections.

■ One in ten of Lusitania’s inhabitants are now immigrants, and this discounts those — many from Brazil and other former parts of the once-world-spanning Portuguese empire — who have managed to acquire citizenship through various routes.

Ukrainian number-plates are now frequently be seen on the roads of Lisbon, as far in Europe as you can get from Big Bad Uncle Vlad.

Vasco Queirós asks: Who is Portugal for?

■ Speaking of world-spanning empires, in true andrewcusackdotcom fashion, we haven’t had enough of the Dutch — but we have had enough of their wicked wayward heresies.

Historian Charles H. Parker explores the legacies of Calvinism in the Dutch empire.

■ The City of New York itself is the best journalism school there is. Jimmy Breslin dropped out of LIU after two years, eventually taking up his pen. Pete Hamill left school at fifteen, apprenticed as a sheet metal worker, and joined the navy.

William Deresiewicz argues that a dose of working-class realism can save journalism from groupthink.

■ The New Yorker tells us how a Manchester barkeep found and saved a lost (ostensible) masterpiece of interwar British literature.

■ Our inestimable friend Dr Harshan Kumarasingham explores David Torrance’s history of the first Labour government on its hundredth anniversary.

■ And finally, one for nous les normandes (ok, ok, celto-normandes): Canada’s National Treasure David Warren briefly muses that the Norman infusion greatly refined Anglo-Saxon to give us the superior English tongue we speak today.

■ I had the great privilege of studying French Algeria under the knowledgeable and congenial Dr Stephen Tyre of St Andrews University and the country continues to exude an interest. The Algerian detective novelist Yasmina Khadra — nom de plume of the army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul — has attracted notice in Angledom since being translated from the Gallic into our vulgar tongue.

Recently the columnist Matthew Parris visited Algeria for leisurely purposes and reports on the experience.

■ While you’re at the Spectator, of course by now you should have already studied my lament for the excessive strength of widely available beers — provoked by the news that Sam Smith’s Brewery have increased the alcohol level of their trusty and reliable Alpine Lager.

■ This week Elijah Granet of the Legal Style Blog shared this numismatic gem. It makes one realise quite how dull our coin designs are these days. I don’t see why we shouldn’t have an updated version of this for our currently reigning Charles.

■ Meanwhile Chris Akers of Investors Chronicle and the Financial Times has gone on retreat to Scotland’s ancient abbey of Pluscarden and written up the experience for the FT. As he settled into the monastic rhythm, Chris found he was unwinding more than he ever has on any tropical beach.

Pluscarden is Britain’s only monastic community now in its original abbey, the building having been preserved — albeit greatly damaged until it was restarted in 1948. The older Buckfast is also on its original site but was entirely razed by 1800 or so and rebuilt from the 1900s onwards. (Pluscarden also has an excellent monastic shop.)

■ An entirely different and more disappointing form of retreat in Scottish religion is the (Presbyterian) state kirk’s decision to withdraw from tons of their smaller churches. St Monans is one of the mediæval gems of Fife, overlooking the harbour of the eponymous saint’s village since the fourteenth century, and built on the site of an earlier place of worship.

Cllr Sean Dillon pointed out the East Neuk is to lose six churches — some of which have been in the Kirk’s hands since they were confiscated at the Reformation, including St Monans.

John Lloyd, also of the FT, reported on this last summer and spoke to my old church history tutor, the Rev Dr Ian C. Bradley. More on the closures in the Courier and Fife Today.

What a dream it would be for a charitable trust to buy St Monans and to restore it to its appearance circa 1500 or so, available as a place of worship and as a living demonstration of Scotland’s rich and polychromatic culture that was so tragically destroyed in the sixteenth century. You could open with a Carver Mass conducted by Sir James MacMillan.

■ And finally, on the last day of MMXXIII, the architect Conor Lynch reports in from Connemara with this scene of idyllic bliss:

“Lebanese money was worth more and there was more to eat when militias were fighting each other in the streets of Beirut 40 years ago than there is today.”

One of the great ironies of Lebanon’s current decline (Fernandez points out) is that, as destructive as the Civil War was, the country’s hopes were finally crushed by bankers and politicians rather than warlords.

— A bumper from The European Conservative: Tim Stanley says “Stay away from politics!” (I couldn’t agree less: we need brighter people involved!)

■  Idealists in Europe refusing to bow to reality have provided false hope to countries that have no real prospect of becoming members of NATO or the EU.

Damir Marusic muses on the Ukraine in How Not to Bend the Arc of History.

■  I ran into my friend João at a dinner party last night and he described the very existence of Brazil as “the greatest thing Portugal ever did”.

In 2018, Americas Quarterly claimed the now-deceased Olavo de Carvalho was the most important voice in Brazil’s then-incoming government (even though he didn’t live there).

More bizarrely fascinating is Nick Burns’s 2019 article on Bruno Tolentino, Carvalho, Ernesto Araújo, and the origins of the new Brazilian right.

Brazil’s foreign minister “penned an eyebrow-raising article for Bloomberg in which he blamed Ludwig Wittgenstein for Brazil’s debility on the world stage”.

If you’ve never lived in Latin America (I claim to have been at least partly educated there) you will never really understand quite how different it is.

■  When Algeria became independent, President Ben Bella had spent so long in French prisons that he had almost forgotten his Arabic.

One million French Algerians left within months, as American diplomats in Paris and Algiers at the time recall.

French Algerians “not only controlled the whole private sector, they had all the top government positions, and more importantly, they filled all the minor positions. The guy who read the gas meter in the utility company was a Frenchman. The women who worked the switchboard in the telephone company were all French. So the economy just came to a screeching halt.”

— Ex Africa semper aliquid novi: A new documentary (watchable online) explores Algeria under Vichy while another looks at Jacques Foccart, de Gaulle’s “Mister Africa”.

■  I am not much of a “Substack” aficionado, but I have recently given in and signed up to receive The Postliberal Order in my inbox. It’s penned by the quadrivirate of Vermeule, Deneen, Pappin, and Pecknold — all of whom have become household names in Cusackistan.

Patrick Deneen’s latest contribution on emerging postliberalism amidst the political persuasions of his students is worth a read.

• It is almost certain that we will never know who the actual winner of the 2020 presidential election was: the methods of fraud which might have been deployed are by their very nature ephemeral. Anton is right in that the best summary of the irregularities is from the U.S.-based Swedish academic Claes Ryn: How the 2020 Election Could Have Been Stolen. Ryn’s academic work is always an insightful read so his take here is worthwhile.

• I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Frenchman Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is always worth reading and always brings something to the table. P.E.G. argues the pre-Trumpers, anti-Trumpers, and never-Trumpers on the American centre-right need to recognise the reasons why Trump became a political phenomenon in the first place: Why Establishment Conservatives Still Miss the Point of Trump.

• One of the best books on urbanism in the Cusackian library is Allan Jacobs’s Great Streets. The expert work with its illustrative maps, diagrams, and line drawings is now a quarter-century old and on this anniversary Theo Mackey Pollack examines What Makes a Great Street.

• A new book argues that our vision of Northern Ireland as a corrupt and gerrymandered statelet from its birth in 1921 until the imposition of direct rule in 1972 is largely a myth. The editors Patrick J Roche and Brian Barton take to the pages of the once-great Irish Times to offer A Unionist History of Northern Ireland. It’s… an interesting perspective that will doubtless provoke a debate, but colour me sceptical.

• Autumn and winter are a time for ghouls and ghosts and eery tales. At Boodle’s for dinner two or three years ago I sat next to the wife of a friend and exchanged favourite writers. I gave her the ‘Transylvanian Tolstoy’ Miklos Banffy, in exchange for which she introduced me to the English writer M.R. James — whose work I’ve immensely enjoyed diving into. The inestimable Niall Gooch writes about Christmas, Ghosts, and M.R. James, as well as pointing to Aris Roussinos on how Britons’ love for ghostly tales is a sign of (little-c) conservatism.

• There can be few figures in English history more ridiculous than Sir Oswald Mosley. But the Conservative MP who became a Labour government minister and then British fascist führer-in-waiting was also forceful in his condemnation of the savagery unleashed by the Black-and-Tans. In 1952 a local newspaper in Ireland announced that Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley “charmed with Ireland, its people, the tempo of its life, and its scenery” had taken up residence at Clonfert Palace in Co. Galway. “Sir Oswald,” the paper noted with amazing restraint, “was the former leader of a political movement in England.” Maurice Walsh presents us with the history of Mosley in Ireland.

• The death of the late Lord Sacks, Britain’s former Chief Rabbi, was the subject of much lament. Rabbi Sacks was obviously no Catholic, but his intellect, frankness, and generosity were much appreciated by Christians. Sohrab Ahmari, one of the editors at New York’s most ancient and venerable daily newspaper, offers a Catholic tribute to Jonathan Sacks.

• “Education, Education, Education” has become a mantra in the past quarter-century and while there is a point there’s also a certain error of mistaking the means to an end for the end itself. After all, in the 1930s Germany was the most and highest educated country in the world. At Tablet, probably America’s best Jewish magazine, Ashley K. Fernandes explores why so many doctors became Nazis.

• Fifty years ago the great people of the state of New York rejected both the Republican incumbent and a Democratic challenger to elect the third-party Conservative candidate James Buckley as the Empire State’s senator in Washington. At National Review Jack Fowler tells the gleeful story of the unique circumstances that brought about this victory for Knickerbocker Toryism and how Mr Buckley went to the Senate.

• France’s Year of de Gaulle has marked the fiftieth anniversary of his death earlier this month and what would have been the general’s one-hundred-and-thirtieth birthday yesterday. Julien Nourian has put together a Weberian analysis of the general and his charismatic mystique.

• President Trump is a very different kind of leader to de Gaulle, and his chances of continuing in the White House are not looking great at the moment. (Our head of legal in New York thinks he’s still got a chance, however.)

Regardless of who will be inaugurated in January of next year, Trump managed to win the highest proportion of minority votes of any Republican candidate since 1960 (when the GOP choice was a member of the NAACP). Meanwhile, Trump lost votes among old, white, well-to-do men.

What is the future of American political conservatism? Ben Hachten points out It’s Not Your Father’s GOP.

New England poli-sci professor Darel E. Paul explores The Future of Conservative Populism, pointing out the big increase in the Hispanic vote for Trump — especially Hispanics living in Texas along the Mexican border.

• In Britain, Ferdie Rous says the Conservative party is having difficulty reconciling the business wing of the party with our rural roots, but suggests that The writings of Lewis and Tolkien embody conservative environmentalism.

Meanwhile David Skelton asserts It was working class voters who delivered this majority – and Johnson must not abandon them now.

• Here in London we’re still in the middle of the second lockdown. Instead of following the science, governments around the world are implementing the exact opposite of effective measures to combat the pandemic. It’s The Greatest Scandal of Our Lifetime according to R.J. Quinn.

• We can always do a with a dose of Metternich and Wolfram Siemann’s 900-page doorstop has provided a chance for many to analyse the master diplomat. Ferdinand Mount examines The Prime Minister of the World.

• And finally, the Museum of Literature Ireland features an online exhibition on the American writer, speaker, reformer, and statesman Frederick Douglass’s visit to Ireland 175 years ago. (Available as Gaeilge too.)

• Some enthusiasts like to go bird-watching, but James Panero of The New Criterion likes to go house-watching. “[O]ur country is fertile ground for good house-watching. Fine examples, of just about any style of any period, abound. What stories they tell if only we listened to their calls.”

• Psephologists are still extrapolating ideas and conclusions from the results of December’s general election here in the UK that handed Boris Johnson a handy majority. One of the most important analyses comes from the philosopher John Gray in the New Statesman: Why the Left Keeps Losing.

• For years, EU leaders have insisted that Brexit would be a disaster for Britain, leaving your country hopelessly isolated, Alexander von Schoenburg, the editor of Europe’s highest-selling newspaper, reports from Berlin. “According to the relentless propaganda of the pro-EU cause, Europe would forge ahead on the global stage, ever more united, while the UK would slide into insularity and decline. But that narrative is starting to look like a delusion.”

• British liberals have created a Europe of their imagination, Ed West writes at UnHerd. But how closely does it resemble reality?

• As the founder of the Anglo-Gaullist Working Group I often ask myself “What would de Gaulle do?” James Pinkerton (the American Conservative) argues that when it comes to Afghanistan, the great Frenchman would advise President Trump to stand his Deep State antagonists down and bring the troops home.

• For centuries Spain faced a perfect storm of enemies that fostered an anti-historical legacy of lies collectively known as the Black Legend. In the University Bookman, Alberto M. Fernandez reviews the surprise Spanish best-seller written by a woman who, according to one newspaper, “has liberated thousands of ideological hostages from a national cancer”.

• The 1930s Oxford social anthropologist J.D. Unwin studied five thousand years of human existence and discovered you can either have a high level of cultural achievement or widespread sexual freedom but never both. Kirk Durston explores why sexual morality may be far more important than you ever thought.

• America’s secular liberalism isn’t secular at all: it is merely the latest stage in the adaptation of an inevitably deracinated Protestantism, Patrick Deneen argues.

• René Rémond’s model of France’s three right wings — Legitimist, Bonapartist, and Orleanist — is breaking down because, Luke Nicastro argues, Emmanuel Macron is co-opting both Orleanists and Gaullists into his electoral family.

• And finally, a historic note, it’s been more than a quarter-century since the late Anthony Lejeune went on A Tour of New York’s Clubland.

• In Spiked, James Heartfield urges us to spurn Labour’s counsel and instead stop apologising for the past.

• Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review wonders if Republican Missouri senator Josh Hawley might be the next Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

• Why would an Eton- and Oxford-educated man assert he ‘supports’ Aston Villa, a football team based in a slum in Birmingham, a city with which he has no connection? Theodore Dalrymple ponders David Cameron’s Big Lie at Law & Liberty.

• At the American Conservative, Rod Dreher ponders the radicalism of today’s left and whether its religious fervour to deny scientific realities like biological sex is driving Trump-hating lefties to back the Donald for president.

• And, for a decent long read, politics professor Daniel E. Burns examines how critics and defenders of liberalism often argue past one another:

It refers, on the one hand, to a set of political practices, and on the other hand, to a political theory that purports to explain those practices. Defenders of liberalism are thinking first and foremost about liberal political practice, which they (almost all) defend by drawing selectively on liberal theory. Critics of liberalism are thinking first and foremost about liberal political theory, which they (almost all) attack by pointing selectively to liberal practice.

In National Affairs, it’s a question of Liberal Practice v. Liberal Theory.

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