1,835 words
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…)
2,644 words
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…)
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…)
Bill Hopkins
4,109 words
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…)
Hopkins, around the time of Declaration and The Divine and the Decay (1957).
3,016 words
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.”
