Tag: Albert Camus

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Albert Camus
Trans. Joseph Laredo
The Stranger
London: Penguin, 2000 (1942)

“I love my country too much to be a nationalist.”

— Attributed to Albert Camus  (more…)

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“But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all.”
–  Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)

The Coronavirus pandemic has rather put me in mind of Albert Camus’s classic allegorical book about the pestilence that struck the “ugly and smug little port town” of his native Oran in the 1940s. The plague is a metaphor that Camus rather unsubtly intended to represent the growth of National Socialism (more…)

Robert Brasillach at his trial in 1945.

3,574 words

Today is the birthday of Robert Brasillach, French journalist, novelist, and film historian (The History of Motion Pictures, co-written with Maurice Bardéche).

It is Brasillach’s fate mainly to be remembered for being the only collaborateur sentenced to death (by firing squad) for “intellectual crimes.”  (more…)

Robert Brasillach at his trial in 1945.

3,574 words

Today is the birthday of Robert Brasillach, French journalist, novelist, and film historian (The History of Motion Pictures, co-written with Maurice Bardéche).

It is Brasillach’s fate mainly to be remembered for being the only collaborateur sentenced to death (by firing squad) for “intellectual crimes.”  (more…)

Robert Brasillach at his trial in 1945.

3,570 words

Today is the birthday of Robert Brasillach, French journalist, novelist, and film historian (The History of Motion Pictures, co-written with Maurice Bardéche).

It is Brasillach’s fate mainly to be remembered for being the only collaborateur sentenced to death (by firing squad) for “intellectual crimes.” (more…)

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Part 2 of 2

President de Gaulle: The Illusions of Grandeur

The Fourth Republic, widely considered just as indecisive and decadent as the previous parliamentary regime, was incapable of maintaining the empire. In Indochina, a long war of attrition was waged, the politicians not having the will to send draftees, preserving the public from this hardship.  (more…)

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It is December 10, 1957, and a cold, dark day in Stockholm, Sweden. Inside the hall, however, it is bright and warm, with many of the world’s leading men assembled for the chance to hear directly from the bright young man about to be honored. His voice has rung out as a sign of hope and a challenge to tyrants and dictators, his work acclaimed and already achieving a place of honor in the curricula of the world’s universities.  (more…)

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Dave Wallis
Only Lovers Left Alive
London: Anthony Blond, 1964
Richmond, Va.: Valancourt, 2015

“In those days, before the death of the last square . . .”

At some point, I suppose with Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange,[1] the “youth in trouble” genre, already fairly exploitative beneath its standard moralistic framework,[2] mutated into a “cult of youth” format, (more…)

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Albert Camus’ The Stranger had a powerful effect on me when I first read it at the age of 18. Recently I had cause to pick it up again when I re-read Bill Hopkins’ The Leap! (a.k.a. The Divine and the Decay) with the aim of writing an essay on it. Hopkins’ manner of constructing a plot out of seemingly trivial, tedious, and disconnected events that suddenly come together in an emotionally shattering climax — a climax that seems utterly surprising yet in hindsight utterly inevitable — brought to mind The Stranger.  (more…)

Bill Hopkins, 1928–2011

59:34 / 9,640 words

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Editor’s Note:

The following text is transcript by V. S. of a lecture by Jonathan Bowden given at the 7th New Right meeting in London on April 8, 2006 entitled “Bill Hopkins: An Anti-Humanist Life.” (more…)