Tag: memoirs

5,037 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

In January of 2007, my e-mail offered a suspiciously cheery post: “Hello my dear Steven. Thank you for your answer!” (more…)

6,544 words

This is an excerpt from my memoir The Xena Years, about life in the nineties. It seems relevant today.

I had just climbed out of the pool when the woman bowed towards Mecca. (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…)

1,535 words

When I arrived to Sweden in February I had not seen much snow in over a year. I walked down an ice- and snow-covered road, learning to read the street names. (more…)

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Part 2 of 2

Bill Hopkins

3. “The corrupt vigour of fascism.”

In early 1958, Time magazine ran a humorous squib titled “Sloane Square Stomp.”[9] It told how Colin Wilson (and presumably Bill) had attended a premiere of their friend Stuart Holroyd’s new play at the Royal Court Theatre. Bill and Colin’s onetime friend Christopher Logue stood up in the stalls with Kenneth Tynan, denouncing Holroyd and Wilson as fascists. During the interval, this led to a shoving match in a nearby bar. The whole thing was a tempest in a teapot, (more…)

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Part 1 of 2

Hopkins, around the time of Declaration and The Divine and the Decay (1957).

(Told in the discursive spirit, if not quite the style, of Jonathan Bowden.)

“The evidence of exhaustion stares out from the columns of the daily newspapers. The references to ‘Angry Young Men’ for example, record a general astonishment at the vigour of simply being angry. Another instance is the hero-worship of the late James Dean, who posthumously remains as the embodiment of Youth’s violent rebuttal of a society grown pointless. That the rejection is equally pointless does not appear to matter; the sincerity redeems it.”

— Bill Hopkins, “Ways Without a Precedent,” in Declaration, 1957  (more…)

3,094 words

Alfred Rosenberg
Memoirs
Ostara Publications, 2015

According to Joseph Kingsbury-Smith, who covered the executions for the International News Service, Rosenberg was the only condemned man who, when asked at the gallows if he had any last statement to make, replied with only one word: “No.”

If only he had kept his mouth shut in the first place! (more…)

4,540 words

Bradley R. Smith
A Personal History of Moral Decay
Charleston, W.V.: Nine-Banded Books, 2014

“I’m setting out to see the world and make my fortune, just like they did in the old days. I know I’m past the age when these things are normally taken care of, but I’m a slow starter.”

(more…)