• 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

Caro had been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard studying urban planning and land use when he came up with the idea for the book. He thought it would take him nine months, but extensive research and over five-hundred in-person interviews meant it took eight years to complete.

Caro then started working on his study of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the first volume of which emerged in 1982 and the fifth (and final?) one he is still working on. (At the end of the fourth, LBJ had just become president.)

But where does he write? Christopher Bonanos of New York magazine finds out:

It’s an ageless space, one where it could be last week or 1950 inside, matter-of-fact and utilitarian. A couple of bookcases, a plywood work surface, corkboard with outlines tacked up, an old brass lamp, an underworked laptop for emails, a Smith-Corona typewriter. The desk chair is hard wood with no cushion. There’s a saltshaker next to the pencil cup for when Ina brings a sandwich out at midday. The desk has a big half-moon cutout, same as the one back in New York, so he can rest his weight on his forearms and ease his bad back. That arrangement was recommended by Janet Travell, the doctor who grew famous for prescribing John F. Kennedy his Boston rocker. She, with Ina, is a dedicatee of The Power Broker.

He bought the prefab shack, he says, from a place in Riverhead for $2,300, after a contractor quoted him a comically overstuffed Hamptons price to build one. “Thirty years, and it’s never leaked,” he says. This particular shed was a floor sample, bought because he wanted it delivered right away. The business’s owner demurred. “So I said the following thing, which is always the magic words with people who work: ‘I can’t lose the days.’ She gets up, sort of pads back around the corner, and I hear her calling someone … and she comes back and she says, ‘You can have it tomorrow.’”

Does he write out here every day? “Pretty much every day.” Weekends too? “Yeah.” Does he go out much while he’s on the East End? “We have two friends who live south of the highway, and I said to Ina, aside from them, I’m not going this year.” There are other writer friends nearby in Sag Harbor, and they get together, but at this age, Caro admits a little sadly, they’re thinning out. He’ll be 89 this fall.

■ George Grant is a still-underappreciated giant of political thinking in the English-speaking world. He is too little known outside his native Canada, which he sought to defend from the undue overwhelming influence of its sparkling and glamourous southern neighbour. Next year marks the sixtieth anniversary of his Lament for a Nation.

Of all people, a research fellow at Communist China’s Institute for the Marxist Study of Religion — George Dunn — has written a thoughtful introductory overview of Grant’s life and thinking: George Grant and Conservative Social Democracy in Compact.

■ Katja Hoyer mused on an overlapping theme in a recent Berliner Zeitung column which she has helpfully presented in English as well:

A diplomat close to the SPD recently told me that he couldn’t understand why working-class people in particular voted for the AfD. Things weren’t so bad for them, after all. I didn’t bother pointing out that rampant inflation, high energy prices and rising rents have had a hugely detrimental effect on the living standards of people with low and middle incomes because his analysis completely misses the point.

Germany’s working-class voters, Katja argues, feel forgotten by the parties founded to represent them.

■ Since the fall of the Berlin Wall — and earlier in Angledom — political conservatism has effectively been taken over by economic liberalism.

This has denied the centre-right from learning from and deploying useful experience from outside liberalism, with the wisdom of figures as varied as Benjamin Disraeli, Giorgio La Pira, Charles de Gaulle, and Thomas Playford essentially ignored or sidelined.

Kit Kowol’s new book Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War explores the visionary side of wartime Conservatism. Dr Francis Young offers his take on Tory utopias in The Critic.

■ From a similar era, Andrew Ehrhardt writes at Engelsberg Ideas on Ernest Bevin and the moral-spiritual dimension of British foreign policy.

■ Our friend Samuel Rubinstein has studied at Oxford, Leiden, and the Sorbonne — technically the oldest universities in their three respective countries (although we all know that Leuven is in fact the doyen of Netherlandish academies).

Sam offers an incredibly interesting comparison of the experiences of these three institutions in a humble essay on his Odyssean education:

I arrived in Leiden, armed with my phrase-book, with some ambitions of learning Dutch. The first blow came at the Starbucks in the train station, when the barista answered my Ik wil graag in English without hesitating. The second came the following day when I tried again, at a different café – only this time it seemed that the barista (Spanish? Italian?) didn’t know much Dutch either: even the natives were placing their orders in English. So I gave up – save one hobby, reading Huizinga in the original. I got myself an attractive coffee-table edition of Herfsttij and managed a page or so a day, strenuously piecing it together from my English, German, and smattering of Old English. I still haven’t the faintest idea how to pronounce any of it.

■ And finally, those of us who love Transylvania will enjoy Toby Guise’s summary of the Fifth Transylvanian Book Festival in The New Criterion.

With his kind permission, it is reproduced here:

I truly have no idea. I’ve never stopped to think about it. It’s probably a compulsion of some kind. I’ve always been a firm believer that some things you must stop yourself every now and then and analyse and there are other things you should never question and just accept. Reading falls in the latter category.

You’re a very social person though.

So I’m told.

And you live in London – a very social place. Is it difficult to get reading in then?

Yes and no. You need to force yourself to read before bed. It’s important to always have a book on the go. If you’re in London you’ve got tube journeys or the bus or whatever as you get from A to B. You have to maximise that time. Put it to use.

That’s why all books should be available in handy paperback editions that can fit in your coat pocket. This is much easier in winter when you’ve got a coat. In summer – also an excellent reading season in many ways – I don’t like feeling encumbered. I don’t like to carry things around. So unless it’s an old Penguin size – the perfect size – that I can slip into my back pocket then I tend not to read on the go.

You’re very passionate about book design and production.

I’m very correct about book design. It is unfathomable how incredibly and completely wrong the entire publishing sector in the English-speaking world is. I know the grass is always greener, but I’ve pointed out again and again how much better it is in France and also Germany a bit. Germany for the classics they have those excellent Reclam editions – Universal-Bibliothek – that are so useful. They are dirt cheap, small size, the easiest thing in the world to purchase, read, use, carry around. Insanely practical.

In backwards Angledom meanwhile every new book comes out in clunky hardback first and you have to wait a year or sometimes longer before you can get it in a form human beings can use. Why? Okay, maybe someone likes sitting in an armchair in their “study” smoking a pipe and reading a hardback book — D. W-B in Edinburgh, I imagine. Good for them. Do you really think that’s most people? I don’t have a commute – I have a fifteen-minute walk to work – but who wants to lug a massive hardcover on a train or a tube? Ridiculous.

But you’ve…

Another thing! It’s also perfect proof of the lies that the liberal capitalists would have us believe. They contend that if there’s a market for something it will just magically appear and the need will be fulfilled. Balderdash of the highest order. Culture exists. And publishing culture in the English-speaking world ordains you must publish the clunky cumbersome version first and then wait to issue a paperback version. Oh and when the paperback edition comes out it’s also too big in size. If ever I wield supreme dictatorial power you better believe I’d be forcing a return to the old Penguin size. Penguin don’t even use it anymore. Idiots.

But you’ve said you don’t read living writers so I guess you’re not buying newly published books anyway.

Okay, yes, maybe. Everyone knows to be a writer worth reading you’ve got to be dead. Turns out this isn’t exactly true. There are actually a good number writers scribbling away today who are perfectly worth reading, even if maybe they’re not high literature and they won’t end up in the Pantheon. Middle-brow – even popular novels – can be extremely enjoyable and worthwhile. They use up a different part of your brain. But they can be exceedingly clever. Just look at detective fiction. Agatha Christie. Insane talent, deployed in a very specific fashion. Not Shakespeare, not Racine…

Racine was a dramaturge, not a novelist.

Ooooh! Look at you! “Dramaturge”. You mean a playwright, a dramatist. “Dramaturge.” I mean really… Racine was a writer, tout court. You know what I mean. Incidentally I bought some French drama recently. Molière.

You’ve been involved in some French drama recently.

In a manner of speaking… [Several sentences of this interview redacted from public display to protect the guilty.]

…But I’ve got Molière on my pile for this winter.

Do you read a lot of French writers?

Hmm… No… Maybe? No, I don’t think so. I try and keep abreast of things. I probably read more Arabs at the moment. Right now I’m in the middle of Amara Lakhous: Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Pizza Vittorio. So far it’s very clever, very human. But Lakhous is an Arab in Europe. Or is he in New York now these days? But he was in Italy for years and writes in Italian sometimes and in Arabic.

Majdalani. Charif Majdalani: he’s a proper Arab writer. Lives in Beirut.

He used to work in France though.

Okay, okay, yes. But he’s a proper Lebanese writer, alive too. I think he’s teaching at Saint-Joseph. I have him on my pile at home but I haven’t read him yet.

A little lighter – well, not in subject matter – but I’d like to read Yasmina Khadra, the pseudonym of the Algerian detective writer Moulessehoul.

Khadra lives in France, too.

Okay! Yes! I get it! Maybe you’d live in France too if you were an ex-army officer who criticised Bouteflika. Anyhow. His police novels, they’re Algiers. Gritty. I need to read them.

Lakhous is clever though – I hope not too clever. A little whimsical. It’s the world of the non-European in Europe. Chika Unigwe writing the experience of Nigerians abroad. Her writing has a very basic primalness to it.

But the non-Euro experience of Europe: Maybe there’s not enough of that – or maybe there is but it’s done by crap writers who are praised just for their backgrounds. Turns out there’s no need because there are actually good writers doing things.

But there’s plenty of rubbish. In general.

Oh ho ho – so much rubbish. But you can just ignore that. Never get distracted by it. Life’s too short.

You’ve often said that people need to curate their attention span.

Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes! There’s so much beauty in the world, whether in real life or in art and writing and plays and everything. You will be so much better off if you just ignore the crap. It’s not worth your attention. It sure as hell ain’t worth mine.

Who else of the Arabs?

Alaa al Aswany – is he any good?

I haven’t read him. You live in London: how do you keep up with Arab writers?

Oh you just do, somehow. Via French for one thing. Keep your eyes on Le Figaro littéraire. They’re in there a lot and then you have to see if they’ve been translated into English. Often you find the author but not the latest as they’re either written in French or translated into it pretty quickly. But you hear about a writer and you see what’s been translated into English. And obviously L’Orient littéraire is superb for trying to get to know the ecosystem of Arab writers. And Arablit Quarterly.

Do you read novels in French?

No – my French is actually terrible. I’m good at reading things like newspapers and non-fiction in French. Probably misunderstanding half of it, but good enough. I cannot read fiction in French, not good enough. Or maybe I just don’t try.

At a sort-of conference the other day, Adrian Pabst — what a gent he is — he introduced me to some visitors as a “fellow francophone”. Generous — I had to correct him. Anyhow, I need to learn French better. Tout le monde civilisé parle, lit et pense en français.

Est-ce que tu es civilisé ?

Ah! Nous – les celtes, les anglais, whatever – on est un peu des barbares. But the light of civilisation has fallen upon us as well. Celts in particular – I think we like to do things with words. We can deploy them in amazing subterfuges.

And then there’s Stoppard.

Stoppard: the nexus of Jewry, Mitteleuropa, and the English language.

Precisement. I know he’s a show-off. Everyone always says he’s a show-off. But come on, he’s amazing.

By the way, this is my first year where I will have in one calendar year seen three different Stoppard productions. ‘The Real Thing’ at the Old Vic – that was brilliant, just ended – and earlier ‘Rock ’n’ Roll’ at the Hampstead Theatre. Nathaniel Parker, excellent on stage.

I love going to the Hampstead Theatre because the congregation is very Jewish and it makes me feel at home.

New York.

Exactly. And then next month there’s something at… well I don’t know which theatre. Or which play.

The Invention of Love?

Yes! The Invention of Love.

That’s also the Hampstead Theatre.

Perfect. I think the first Stoppard I saw was there. They’re into him. I think he’s into them, too.

What about history though? What history are you reading?

You know, the American colonial period and the early republic have produced so much historical writing. A lot of it is very good. Okay, a lot of it is crap, too. There’s far too much pious nonsense – all that Founding Father worship, it’s excessively tiresome. Jefferson? Nein danke! Did you see they took the statue of Jefferson out of [New York’s] City Hall? Yeah they did it for the wrong reasons but – why was he there to begin with?

He’s Virginian.

He’s Virginian! And not one of the good ones! But there are so many interesting characters and amazingly accomplished people. I find George Washington boring but there are so many fascinating people from this time. You just have to avoid the pious stuff that a certain kind of respectable established American writer type can write about them.

There’s that wonderful institute at William & Mary.

I thought you were anti-Virginian.

I’m pro William & Mary. The college, that is – definitely not the monarchs. Anyhow, they have this institute for early American history and it publishes excellent historical stuff. Has done for decades. They have a quarterly journal.

Favourite Virginian writer?

Poe. Am I allowed to say Poe? Was he a Marylander?

He was born in Boston.

We won’t hold that against him. Baltimore claims him. No one associates him with Boston. I think his formative years were in Virginia. He was kicked out of West Point. And we also have Poe Cottage in New York.

Is Poe a good writer for Hallowe’en?

Oh of course. Reading is very seasonal, isn’t it? I only got into that horror stuff – what do you call it? Gothic, I guess. I only started enjoying that a few years ago. We read Poe at school, of course. But a few years ago, one winter’s evening — I was at a dinner at Boodle’s and sitting next to a princess…

Finally, the name dropping. I was warned it would come.

Just for that I won’t say which. Well she started going on about M.R. James and how brilliant he was and his stories and the settings and everything, so I got into M.R. James. And I read all his short stories. Or maybe they were just the Penguin selected ones? Anyhow, I told this to my friend – my best friend, in fact – and he said he’d recommended M.R. James to me years ago and I did nothing about it. Oh well. Sometimes you need someone to tell you things in the right setting, the soft candlelight, the gentle murmur of a table full of people in a hall… Robertson Davies! His ghost stories as well. He was made head of Massey College at Toronto — basically the All Souls of Toronto — and would write a new ghost story every year to be read aloud after some annual dinner in hall.

Speaking of which, I believe we’re being called in to dinner.

Procedamus.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Instead, I will give an actual Christmas book list — namely, a list of books I intend to read this Christmas, snuggled up in whatsoever sufficient level of coziness I manage to achieve.

If you want to read a partial selection of books I’ve already finished reading, there is a Twitter thread you can consult (though, naturally, it doesn’t list everything).

But here are the eight books I’m looking forward to devouring.

Thomas Pink is now Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London but he is no less busy since he has several volumes either to write or to edit on his to-do list. As a natural polymath with many interests, Tom is one of the best book-recommenders I have the privilege of knowing.

Last time we had a drink he put forward Mary Hollingsworth’s Conclave 1559: Ippolito d’Este and the Papal Election of 1559. It’s the only one on my Christmas reading list I’ve already jumped right into, and it’s excellent so far.

This is a period of European (and world) history I’ve not devoted any great study to, so Hollingsworth’s accounts almost attains the level of a political thriller. She’s skilled at combining archival research with an eye for the enlightening detail, which makes Conclave 1559 an enjoyable read.

Another history on my list is Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad That Crossed an Ocean by Les Standiford. As a child visiting the colonial city of St Augustine in Florida I remember seeing some of the extraordinary Spanish revival buildings Henry Flagler erected as part of his rail-and-hotel conglomerate.

Florida as we know it today was practically invented over a century ago when Flagler built his Florida East Coast Railway to bring northerners down to the Sunshine State. From 1905 to 1912 he managed a feat of engineering by extending the line across the Florida Keys.

Lawrence Durrell, despite never being a UK citizen thanks to quirks of Indian birth and bureaucracy, spent a few spells of his life working for the British diplomatic service. He’s most famous for his ‘Alexandria Quartet’, but it is White Eagles Over Serbia — a tale of a British agent caught between communists and royalists in post-war Yugoslavia — that has made it to my festal reading list.

Exotic tales of derring-do were the stock in trade of Sir H. Rider Haggard, but I have to admit I’ve never read anything by this popular Victorian/Edwardian writer.

Rectifying this error, King Solomon’s Mines is on my Christmas pile (though I was tempted by She as well).

I love a good detective novel, and the undoubted Queen of Mystery is Dame Agatha Christie. The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding is a collection of short stories including both Miss Marple and Hercules Poirot.

In case I don’t get my fill of ze little grey cells I’ve grabbed a copy of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas as well.

A trip back to my Heimat of New York is provided by Ludwig Bemelmans’ Hotel Splendide. More famous for creating the Madeleine series of children’s books, Bemelmans immigrated to America before the First World War, volunteered for the U.S. Army, and worked at several hotels and restaurants. These latter experiences resulted in this comic novel about life behind the scenes in a swish Manhattan hotel.

Having been previously introduced to the character of Sir Edward Leithen, I thought it might be worth catching up with him in John Buchan’s The Gap in the Curtain.

The Scots barrister and Tory MP is introduced to a brilliant physicist and mathematician who explains his theory on the workings of time and the cryptic ability to see into the future. Buchan is a reliable storyteller with admirable instincts, though this series of stories veers into the realms of science fiction.

But Christmas is a light-hearted time, and so my Christmas reading list finishes with a visit to Blandings Castle thanks to Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse’s Leave it to Psmith.

The ‘p’, of course, is silent — “like in ‘pshrimp’”.

Mercator: Charles de Gaulle: a wise ruler of France

Financial Times: France invokes the golden age of de Gaulle

Politico: Why all French politicians are Gaullists

Variety: Cliché-Ridden ‘De Gaulle’ is Unworthy of Its Iconic Subject

“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.

Painting Johnson as Britain’s first Gaullist prime minister would be a stretch, but there is certainly some crossover: nationalist, economically interventionist, focused on national sovereignty and national exceptionalism.

■  Eliot Wilson pointed out this summer that Boris has always been difficult to classify in ideological terms.

■  Speccie political editor James Forsyth wrote in The Times that Boris the Gaullist puts action over ideas. Just before the party conference Forsyth also predicted the PM’s speech would be “in line with his recent Gaullist turn”.

■  QMUL’s Nick Barlow explores the parallels between de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic and Boris’s style of government.

■  Meanwhile Aris Roussinos argues that de Gaulle was always right in vetoing British entry into the EEC, and that true-blue FBPE types should welcome Brexit as advancing the cause of European integration.

■  Dean Godson (New Statesman) says that Defence Secretary Ben Wallace is pursuing “almost Gaullist trajectory for future British policy”.

■  When asked (on GB News) where he sits on the political spectrum, national treasure Peter Hitchens expressed his surprise that the Gaullist combination of “strong defence, patriotism, a strong welfare state, and national independence” isn’t more common in British politics.

■  ‘Bagehot’, the political column in The Economist, put it that the man who rebuilt post-war France has some important lessons for Britain’s prime minister: What Boris could learn from de Gaulle.

■  The American Conservative embarrassingly illustrated a piece on Europe’s Gaullist Revival with a picture of General Kœnig. (Always check the képi — as a brigadier general, de Gaulle only had two stars!)

■  Mike Bird discerned some Anglo-Gaullism in a pile of recent newspaper headlines.

■  As long ago as 2017 — what a world away that was! — Prospect argued in a somewhat rambling piece that the Brexiteers were Britain’s new Gaullists.

■  Honourable mention: Frederick Studemann chides Churchill and dumps de Gaulle, saying Boris should model himself on Bismarck and make for a Prussian Brexit.

• 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.)

• 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.

This fortnightly review is one of the last places where long-form essays are still the norm. One of the adventures of starting to read a piece in the LRB is that one has no idea whether it will continue for two of the Review’s large pages, or six, or maybe more. In addition to intellectual essays it also contains occasional reporting from Patrick Cockburn, arguably the best journalist reporting on the Middle East today. (You can read my review of Cockburn’s latest book over at Quadrapheme.)

Is it left-wing? Unquestionably. But if you’re only reading what you already agree with, you’re missing the point. Your principles should be strong enough to face challenges, or to be informed by them, and the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff is the most necessary task for any thinking person.

This American monthly came in for a lot of flak from a lot of conservative intellectuals for propagating and defending the neo-con support for the Iraq War, but the Daily Telegraph’s description of The New Criterion as ‘America’s leading review of the arts and intellectual life’ remains true to this day. (Disclosure: I was an editor at TNC from 2006-2008.) Feature articles are informative and expanding, the book reviews provide a good guide for reading, and art-wise I’ve always admired the clean prose of James Panero’s Gallery chronicle.

In recent months New Criterion readers have had the privilege of learning about the Jesuit linguist Albert Jamme’s hatred for sleep — “I hate my bed because it keeps me from my texts!” — and a Duke of Mantua’s expensive interest in female dwarves while last year they published the Quaker pacifist classical scholar Sarah Ruden on the darker side of Mandela’s government. Worth reading every month.

Founded in 1957 by Russell Kirk — the greatest St Andrean of the twentieth century — Modern Age is an academic journal which Wikipedia describes as ‘traditionalist, localist, against most military interventions,’ as well as critical of neo-conservatism and generally sympathetic to religious orthodoxy.

Its archive over the past sixty years provides articles and essays of great value by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Virgil Nemoianu, Lee Congdon, Pierre Manent, and others. Take, for example, Lee Congdon on ‘Conservatism, Christianity, and the Revitalization of Europe’.

A rewarding, more scholarly read, with footnotes that will lead you elsewhere.

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