Tag: Margot Metroland

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Editor’s Note: March 31st marks the 117th birthday of Robert Brasillach, the French journalist, novelist, film historian, and man of the Right who was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad for “intellectual crimes” he was alleged to have committed as a German collaborator during the Second World War. The translation below is offered as a commemoration, and links to other resources regarding Brasillach’s life and work are at the end.

Robert Brasillach & Notre avant-guerre:
The Pre-Phony War (Part II)

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In our last episode of his memoir Notre avant-guerre, Robert Brasillach told us what it was like in September 1938, when he was suddenly called up for mobilization over the Sudetenland crisis, and found himself, like thousands of others, lost in the haste and confusion. (more…)

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In author’s blurbs and other capsule biographies, the late H. Keith Thompson Jr. is usually listed as something like, “NYC corporate executive,” or sometimes, “public relations executive.” But what sort of corporate executive is never explained, let alone the name of the corporation. It is known that he sometimes worked for his father’s small printing firm in the Financial District, yet that can hardly be what he meant when describing his past as a corporate executive. (more…)

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Editor’s Note: March 31st marks the 116th birthday of Robert Brasillach, the French journalist, novelist, film historian, and man of the right who was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad for “intellectual crimes” he was alleged to have committed as a German collaborator during the Second World War. The translation below is offered as a commemoration, and links to other resources regarding Brasillach’s life and work are at the end. (more…)

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Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor
New York: Fordham University Press, 2020

It’s old news that Flannery O’Connor, dead since 1964, has taken some flak for writing letters in which she said she didn’t much like black people. (more…)

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Edward Dutton
Shaman of the Radical Right:
The Life and Mind of Jonathan Bowden
With a Foreword by Greg Johnson
Perth, W.A., Australia: Imperium Press, 2025 (more…)

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Elle Reeve
BLACK PILL: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2024

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A short while ago I wrote about the connections between Willis Carto and the Truth Seeker magazine and its owner Charles Smith, who published the original American edition of Imperium. An equally significant connection there is Frederick C. F. Weiss, who was linked to both the Truth Seeker and the National Renaissance Party (NRP) in New York in the 1950s. Weiss was a longtime friend of Francis Parker Yockey, who sometimes stayed at — or hid out at — Weiss’ farm near Middletown New York, about 60 miles northwest of Manhattan. It was through Weiss that the Truth Seeker’s Charles Smith was introduced to Imperium, and probably to Yockey as well. (more…)

Willis Carto

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A near-forgotten journal of occasional significance, The Truth Seeker, turned 150 years old last September. That makes it, by its own claim, the “World’s Oldest Freethought Publication.” Not that there’s an awful lot of competition there, unless you wish to make mischievous arguments in favor of The Atlantic Monthly or The Economist.

Over the years I crossed paths with the Truth Seeker a few times, yet somehow managed to remain oblivious to key points in its history. For example, I only recently discovered — or was reminded again — that The Truth Seeker Company was the original American publisher of Francis Parker Yockey’s Imperium. (more…)

Robert N. Taylor, Moon Mistress

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I love reading Margot Metroland’s essays and I love when she helps me to remember the various writers and forgotten figures of the American underground of the past. Margot has undoubtedly led a very interesting life and has known many personalities, artists, and interesting people. Judging by her writing, I’d say she’s both smart and sociable, which is a very interesting combination, and at the same time she has an interest in strange things. (more…)

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Colin Wilson
The Angry Years: The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men
London: Anova Books, 2007

When Colin Wilson sat down in 2006 to write his own history of the “Angry Young Men,” it was mainly a matter of settling accounts. There had been at least two other similarly-named books on the subject, and they were informative and entertaining. (more…)

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The following is being published in commemoration of George Orwell’s 121st birthday today.

I’ve been trying to figure out how George Orwell fits into that 1950s literary phenomenon, or cult, called the Angry Young Men. The Angries, as a movement, were partly an invention of the British popular press of 1956-58. Some writers who are included among them, notably Kingsley Amis, rejected the label and got counted in only because they were new young writers with an irksome attitude. Others, such as Colin Wilson, treated the whole concept whimsically or dismissively but used it as a publicity tool. (more…)

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Tom Wolfe
The Painted Word
New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1975 (many editions since)

Long before he died, Tom Wolfe deeded his archives to the New York Public Library (NYPL). When he passed on in 2018, the NYPL put up a little “pop-up” exhibition in commemoration. It would have been bigger, but the Library had just done a slap-up interview and celebration with Wolfe a year and a half earlier, and had mounted another small display of Wolfeiana a year before that. (more…)

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Matthew Dallek
Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right
New York: Basic Books, 2023

A couple of months back I reviewed a biography of Robert Welch (A Conspiratorial Life) that I regarded as superficial and facile.[1] The author, Edward H. Miller, seemed to have no real feel for the issues that motivated Welch and his followers in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. In fact, Miller displayed little sense of that time at all — as a political era, I mean. (more…)