Tag: George Orwell

Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill (1628)

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I was carrying out a literary exercise of quite a different kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself . . . — George Orwell, “Why I Write”

 Litera scripta manet.
(That which is written, remains.)
— John Dewey (more…)

You can pre-order Jonathan Bowden’s collection The Cultured Thug here.

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Jonathan Bowden (ed. by Greg Johnson)
The Cultured Thug
San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2023

Stylistically there are two kinds of Jonathan Bowden essay. There are the neat, trim, polished ones that clock in at 800 to 1,100 words, like a review in The Spectator. Then there are the luxuriant, digressive ones that are always rambling off onto weird, and often interesting, tangents. The difference between the two is that the latter kind usually come to us as transcripts of speeches from gatherings where Bowden had an hour or more to fill, and thus had good reason to pad out his thesis with amusing asides and intriguing anecdotes. (more…)

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Jordan Peterson was asked by journalist Camilla Tominey about his views on multiculturalism during a recent exclusive interview with GB News, Britain’s nominally Right-leaning news station. In a refreshingly scathing tirade, the Canadian public intellectual branded the idea of mixing incongruous population groups together as “a miracle of stupidity,” correctly making the link between diversity of cultures and the potential within multicultural societies for civil conflict. (more…)

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[M]an has ascribed to all that exists a connection with morality and laid an ethical significance on the world’s back. – Friedrich Nietzsche

Everybody wants to rule the world. — Tears for Fears (more…)

Yaroslav Hunka at the Canadian House of Commons.

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Part 1 of 2

On September 22 of this year, the speaker of the Canadian House of Commons agreed to bring a special guest to the Parliament of Canada. That special guest was a 98-year-old Second World War veteran named Yaroslav Hunka. (more…)

Orwell’s passport photo from his time in Burma.

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When did Eric A. Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, lose his virginity? Most biographers haven’t wrestled much with this particular issue. But then came along John Sutherland, a retired academic who published an entertaining book called Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography back in 2016. (I briefly described this cute volume in a 2019 end-of-year Favorite Books wrap-up.)

John Sutherland, bless his soul, spends about half his book reconstructing the carnal history of E. A. Blair. (more…)

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The following is being published in commemoration of George Orwell’s 120th birthday on June 25.

George Orwell is one of those authors well worth stealing, as Orwell famously wrote of Charles Dickens. I am not the first person to start an essay like this. While rummaging through my memory files I recalled a cover piece in the January 1983 Harper’s, and 40 years later I am astounded to discover it begins almost exactly the same way. (more…)

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By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter — one book. This was the book of the Machine. – E. M. Forster

Welcome, my son.
Welcome to the machine.
— Pink Floyd

Writers of fiction are obviously not bound to set their work in their own times. (more…)

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Michael Malice
The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil
Independently Published, 2022

What a joy to open this book and find that whatever the author’s White Pill is supposed to be, it somehow involves Ayn Rand (AR). It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (1971, by Jerome Tuccille) was the name of an actual book that came out when I was in my teens and going through my own brief Objectivist period. The book is a funny saga about the author’s time as a militant libertarian. (more…)

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Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. — George Orwell, 1984

American college students have said, ‘Like 1984, man’, when asked not to smoke pot in the classroom or advised gently to do a little reading. — Anthony Burgess, 1985

I made a half-hearted New Year’s resolution not to mention Orwell’s 1984 this year, not once. Like most of these Janus-faced pledges, however, it didn’t last long. But hasn’t the book been over-visited? (more…)

Barricade of the Communard National Guard, Paris, March 18, 1871.

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Translated by F. Roger Devlin

Introduction here, Chapter 9 Part 2 here, Chapter 10 Part 1 here

The Revolution of 1789 was itself above all a liberal and bourgeois revolution — even “ultra-liberal,” as the very liberal Gaspard Koenig affirms, not failing to celebrate this. (more…)

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Introduction here, Chapter 8 here, Chapter 9 Part 2 here

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

The ecologist Fabrice Nicolino, a member of Charlie Hebdo’s editorial board (he was seriously wounded in the Kouachi brothers’ attack in January 2015), declares:

I am nostalgic for a time when people had a place, when men and women were strongly bound. I am nostalgic for a time when rural civilization was not the garbage it is today, a monstrosity that stuffs people with pesticides. (more…)

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Advanced robotics

Brassneck was a cartoon robot schoolboy from a popular comic I read as a young lad in the 1960s, The Dandy. Older British readers will also remember this comic’s great rival, The Beano, and Dennis the Menace (which was very different from the American Dennis). (more…)