Jonathan Bowden’s The Cultured Thug

208 words

Jonathan Bowden
The Cultured Thug
Ed. Greg Johnson
San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2023
244 pages

“Truthfully, in this age those with intellect have no courage and those with some modicum of physical courage have no intellect. If things are to alter during the next fifty years then we must re-embrace Byron’s ideal: the cultured thug.” —Jonathan Bowden

The Cultured Thug collects eight speeches and four reviews by legendary British New Right intellectual Jonathan Bowden on British sculpture, William Shakespeare, Edward Elgar, H. P. Lovecraft, Robinson Jeffers, George Orwell, the Soviet Gulag, feminism, Aeschylus, George Steiner, Murnau’s Nosferatu, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. The Cultured Thug is an excellent introduction to both the astonishing breadth and unifying threads of Bowden’s interests. Read it, and you’ll become a bit more cultured and a bit more courageous at the same time.

Jonathan Bowden, 1962–2012, was a British novelist, playwright, essayist, painter, actor, and orator, as well as a leading thinker and spokesman of the British New Right. His other books from Counter-Currents are Pulp Fascism: Right-Wing Themes in Comics, Graphic Novels, & Popular Literature (2013); Western Civilization Bites Back (2014); Extremists: Studies in Metapolitics (2017); and Reactionary Modernism (2022), all of them edited by Greg Johnson.