Tag: love

Junior

1,537 words

My dog Junior is a 35-pound Boston Terrier/Boxer mix with the most consistently sweet disposition of any animal I’ve ever owned. He’s a great little guy, and except for his occasional bouts of gassiness, I can’t think of a bad thing to say about him. Yesterday morning while taking him for a walk through my slowly decaying lakeside Georgia community, I was suddenly forced to risk my life in an attempt to save his.

I wouldn’t do such a thing for many people besides my wife and son. (more…)

1,377 words

As my unbelieving and horrified eyes pored over one unacceptable greeting-card image after another, I kept screaming inside — which is why you couldn’t hear me, but trust me, I could hear myself screaming as clear as a bell, so loudly in fact that at one point I felt compelled to scream at myself to stop screaming — and what I kept screaming was, “WHY ALL THE HATE?” (more…)

Painting by Charles-Philippe Larivière of the Battle of Montgisard in 1177 (ca. 1842)

3,554 words

If there ever was a civilization that deserves the name of Renaissance, this was the civilization of the Middle Ages. In its objectivity, its virile spirit, its hierarchical structure, its proud antihumanistic simplicity so often permeated by the sense of the sacred, the Middle Ages represented a return to the origins. — Julius Evola[1] (more…)

Winston & Julia, 1984

2,699 words

Love is best. — last line of Robert Browning’s “Love among the Ruins”

He loved Big Brother. — last line of George Orwell’s 1984 (more…)

1,394 words

Christian Petzold’s Undine, set in contemporary Berlin, begins with Undine Wibeau (Paula Beer) having coffee with Johannes, her boyfriend. It’s not going well. She has deep, penetrating eyes and red hair that looks ready to blaze. She says to him: “You said you loved me. Forever. If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you. You know that.”

We’ve all had girlfriends like that, haven’t we? (more…)

4,893 words

Part 1 here,  Part 2 here

You can watch The Big Parade in its entirety here.

Released in 1925, The Big Parade would go on to become the 2nd largest-grossing film of the entire silent film era. Only Birth of a Nation made more money. The Big Parade was so popular that it played in some theaters continuously for a year and at the Astor Theater in New York for two years. (more…)

William Powell Frith (1819-1909), A May Day Celebration (private collection)

6,740 words

Throughout Europe and the United States, the chill mornings and blossoming trees of spring are giving way to summer’s warmth and abundance. As the midway point between spring and summer, the month of May has historically been a season of great importance to the peoples of Europe, a joyful time of sowing, revelry, feasting, and courtship. (more…)

Edmund Dulac, “The Buried Moon” from The Red Cross Fairy Book, 1916.

4,430 words

He had me at: “It was still the South, he knew it for a certainty when they passed an aged negro in overalls hobbling down along the highway toward no conceivable destination. The land was cursed. God, he loved it.” [1] Tito Perdue, author of the two novels here reviewed, The Smut Book and Cynosura, is a proud Southerner who has enjoyed skewering the sacred cows of these, our cursed times since he became a writer in the early 1980s. (more…)

6,990 words

Suppose your best friend from when you were a young’un became the meanest hombre ever to leave boot-prints on the ground. It indeed happened, on the wild frontier of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Had Attila the Hun been brought forward in time to meet him, he wouldn’t have challenged a gunslinger like that to a duel at twenty paces. The town of Linz might not be big enough for both of them, but the 5th-century “Scourge of God” would’ve known better than to tangle with the dastardly desperado of the Danube! (more…)

5,026 words

Known mostly as a novelist, memoirist, and historian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had actually completed four plays before his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in 1962. He composed his first two, Victory Celebrations and Prisoners, while a zek in the Soviet Gulag (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…)