Author: Margot Metroland

Rolleiflex selfie of Philip Larkin and Monica Jones in Paignton, Devon, circa 1957. (From Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, 1993.)

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The writer Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was born on August 9, 1922, and this essay is part of a commemoration of his centenary. — Ed.

He’s been dead for 37 years, but the Philip Larkin literary industry keeps burbling along, fueled by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of titillating tales, spicy correspondence, and uncollected reviews, diary scraps, and photographs. (more…)

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The following is a commemoration for Willis A. Carto, who was born 96 years ago today.

About a year ago I stumbled across the online Willis A. Carto correspondence archive. It’s a source of never-ending delight. (more…)

Lothrop Stoddard

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This review is published in commemoration of Lothrop Stoddard’s 139th birthday. Stoddard has often been written about and referenced at Counter-Currents; to see these other essays, click on his tag.

Lothrop Stoddard
Master of Manhattan: The Life of Richard Croker
New York/Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1931

Our subject today is “The Lighter Side of . . . Lothrop Stoddard.” I’ll be focusing mostly on the delightful Master of Manhattan, his 1931 biography of Tammany Hall boss Richard Welstead Croker. (more…)

Céline . . . and Houellebecq.

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This essay is being published today to commemorate Céline’s 128th birthday. You can find all of Counter-Currents’ resources on Céline here.

You don’t have to dig too deep through the past two decades of reviews to find that the French novelist-critic Michel Houellebecq is often compared to the late Louis-Ferdinand Céline. (more…)

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Male Supremacism in the United States:
From Patriarchal Traditionalism to Misogynist Incels and the Alt-Right
Series: Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right
Emily K. Carian, Alex DiBranco, Chelsea Ebin (Editors)
Abingdon (Oxon) & New York: Routledge, 2022

Despite its beguiling title and subtitle, I am sorry to report that this new book from Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right is a very sloppy doggy’s dinner. (more…)

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Paul Fussell
Class: A Guide Through the American Class System
New York: Summit Books, 1983 (first edition; many since)

Written in 1980-82 and published in 1983, Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System is one of those rare books that most literate people seem to have heard of, say they want to read if they haven’t, and have fierce opinions about whether they’ve read it or not. I see this last aspect frequently on social media. (more…)

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Standardbearers: British Roots of the New Right
Edited by Jonathan Bowden, Eddy Butler, and Adrian Davies.
With a Foreword by Professor Antony Flew
Beckenham, Kent: The Bloomsbury Forum, 1999

Somewhere between the “hug-a-hoodie” Toryism of David Cameron’s Conservatives, and those far-right parties considered beyond the pale, is believed to lie a broad “respectable” middle ground of British nationalist politics. (more…)

Robert Brasillach

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This continues the translation of Robert Brasillach’s Notre avant-guerre, portions of which have appeared here in three earlier installments.

Preface

In our last episode, Brasillach was taking a motor tour of war-torn Spain in 1938 with two friends (Maurice Bardèche and Pierre Cousteau). (more…)

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English original here

Mezi novináři se dlouhá léta traduje (a dnes to často opakují bloggeři a lidé na sociálních sítích) výrok Oswalda Spenglera, že jsme se ocitli na konci civilizace. Vždyť přece napsal Zánik Západu, nebo ne? Krom toho je pro něj poslední fází civilizace caesarismus, kterým jsme prošli před mnoha desetiletími – tak se to alespoň říká – érou Dolfa & Mussa. (more…)

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The Yuppie Handbook‘s cover illustration is brimming with nostalgia. The tawdry insides are brimming with dreck.

Has it really been 40 years since The Yuppie Handbook? No, its copyright page says it came out January 1, 1984. But the book was so drenched in early-‘80s sensibility that it was already looking dated on its publication date.

Coming back to it today, one gets a pungent whiff of nostalgia and wonderment. (more…)

Colin Flaherty, July 1993. Photograph by author.

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I found some intriguing perspectives in the recent batch of obituaries for Colin Flaherty, who died on January 11. They almost all recall him as best known for his internet videos and bestselling books on under-reported black crime (White Girl Bleed a Lot, Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry, et al.).

Maybe that’s a valid point today. However, having known him for 30 years, I thought of this post-2012 phase as just a minor coda to his career, sort of like Laurence Olivier doing Polaroid commercials in the 1970s. If you had to explain to clueless people who Sir Laurence Olivier was, you’d mention the commercials, and the folks would think, “Oh, he’s this guy who sells cameras.” (more…)

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Sabrina Strings
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
New York: New York University Press, 2019

This was a yummy, provocative idea for a book that didn’t quite work out. Its proposition is that fat-shaming and racism and white supreemism are all part of the same deal. Their history is intertwined. Hundreds of years ago, Europeans looked at the strange, repellent physiognomies and fleshy bodies of the African Negro, the Bushman, and the Hottentot, and were both fascinated and repelled. (more…)