Author: Michael Walker

5,842 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Although the book is not polemical or sensationalistic, still less speculative (de Benoist is no Dan Brown), it is nevertheless provocative. There is provocation in the very title chosen: L’Homme qui n’avait pas de Père, the man who had no father. If there is originality in this book, it is in its insistence on the importance of closely examining Jesus’ family tree, of stressing its importance and weighing up the evidence of his parenthood and family relations. (more…)

6,102 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Alain de Benoist
L’Homme qui n’avait pas de Père: Le Dossier Jésus
Paris: Krisis, 2021
964 pages

All translations of quotations from the book in this review are the author’s. Passages from the Bible are from the King James Version. (more…)

9,970 words

Miklós Horthy
A Life for Hungary: Memoirs
London: Hutchinson, 1956

Thomas L. Sakmyster
Hungary’s Admiral on Horseback: Miklós Horthy, 1918-1944
Boulder: East European Monographs, 1994

Historians of the Second World War and the events leading up to that catastrophe understandably focus on the “big powers”: Japan, Germany, Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, and their leaders. (more…)

7,584 words

Michel Faure
Augusto Pinochet
Paris: Perrin, 2020

From September 11, 1973, until March 11, 1990, Chile was ruled by a pitiless military junta under President Augustus Ramón Pinochet Urgate. Michel Faure has written an extraordinarily dispassionate — I am tempted to say passionless — overview of Pinochet’s life from beginning to end. (more…)

Jean Raspail as photographed by Pascal Parrot in 1981.

8,709 words

On June 13, 2020, the French explorer and novelist Jean Raspail died in Paris at the age of 94. Many were the nationalists, identitarians, and traditional Catholics who paid tribute at his passing. Former European MP and co-founder of the European identity movement Iliade, Jean-Yves Gallou, stated that Raspail was “the man who foretold the destructive impact of blame culture and anti-racism on our civilization back in 1973.”  (more…)

4,427 words

Philippe-Joseph Salazar
Suprémacistes: L’enquête Mondiale chez les Gourous de la Droite Identitaire
Paris: Plon, 2020

This book results from interviews with leading thinkers of the race-conscious right — the so-called alternative right — which seeks to bring race to the forefront of political debate. The title Suprémacistes is, however, misleading; for the author, Philippe-Joseph Salazar, nowhere describes the people who are the subject of this study as supremacists (more…)

Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

3,201 words

Part I

When Purdue Pharmaceutical introduced OxyContin, their marketing for the drug was aggressive, efficient, unscrupulous, and amoral. Resources were poured into advertising; the company spent $200 million on marketing in 2001. Sales grew from $48 million in 1996 to $1.1 billion in 2000, (more…)

2,670 words

During the 1970s and 1980s, when libertarian ideas were in the air, Ayn Rand a fashionable writer, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had romped to power, and the Chicago Boys were invited to demonstrate the merits of free-market economics in South America, a lively debate was being pursued in libertarian circles on how far freedom can go.

Didn’t free individuals have the right to take their own lives, (more…)

4,445 words

Why does Scruton not examine the role of Melot in Death-Devoted Heart more closely?

Tristan und Isolde echoes themes from Romeo and Juliet and Othello, so it is unlikely that Wagner did not have both plays in mind when he composed his opera. The Othello theme is especially clear in the regrets expressed by King Marke that he could not clearly see, just as Othello could not clearly see. Melot, like Iago, faces death if he cannot make good the claim of adultery; (more…)

5,223 words

Sir Roger Scruton, who died of cancer on January 12th, 2020 at the age of seventy-five, wrote more than fifty books, was the editor of the conservative publication The Salisbury Review, and in his final years was briefly chairman — dismissed and subsequently reinstated — of the Conservative Government’s “Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.”

I once met Roger Scruton. He invited me to his flat in London in 1982 where I remember enjoying his excellent wine. (more…)

Alphonse de Châteaubriant

369 words / 58:30

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This is a lost London Forum talk by Michael Walker on four French artists of the Right: Alphonse de Châteaubriant, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, and Robert Brasillach. (more…)

4,564 words

Gunnar Heinsohn
Söhne und Weltmacht: Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der Nationen
Zürich, Switzerland: Orell Füssli Verlag, 2020 (2003)

Robert Malthus’s essay on population growth is widely known and widely refuted, mostly by commentators who have not read it. In his Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus argued that population growth undermined the achievements which technology had brought and was bringing to human society (more…)