Ayaan Hirsi Ali compares the virtues of Western civilization with the vices of her original homeland Somalia, argues that not all cultures or religions are equal, and notes the flood of refugees heading west from the Islamic lands…
Posted in Civilization, People.
Austen Henry Layard (1817-1894) is famous for discovering and excavating the palaces of the Assyrian kings. Undertaken between 1845 and 1851, this achievement made him celebrated as one of archaeology’s great pioneers, a man who brought to public notice a civilization few knew very much about before. The autobiographical materials presented here describe his earlier […]
Posted in For the Record, People.
Seven years after his appointment as Director of Surgery at Bundaberg Base Hospital, six years after nurse Toni Hoffman warned of a mounting toll of patient deaths, five years after he escaped from Australia to hide in Oregon, and two years after his extradition from the USA… Jayant Mukundray Patel, medical miscreant sans pareil, has […]
Posted in War and Peace.
In the Times Literary Supplement for November 20, 2009, the historian and commentator Christopher Coker reviewed two books — Patrick Hennessey’s The Junior Officer’s Reading Club, and James Fergusson’s A Million Bullets. In the heat and boredom of Iraq, Hennessey had set up a reading club and tried to do the same thing later while […]
Posted in War and Peace.
[From David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla, Hurst, 2009, 29-32] Al Qa’ida’s military strategy appears to be aimed at bleeding the United States to exhaustion and bankruptcy, forcing America to withdraw in disarray from the Muslim world so that its local allies collapse, and simultaneously to use the provoking and alienating effects of U.S. intervention as […]
Posted in War and Peace.
(From Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, 1930, by Siegfried Sassoon, Part Eight, The Second Battalion.) Waiting for rumours The Battle of Arras began at 5.30 next morning. For two days we hung about the chateau, listening to the noise (of Military History being manufactured regardless of expense) and waiting for the latest rumours. With forced […]
Posted in War and Peace.
[From War and Peace, Volume IV, Part Two, VII] Count Orlov-Denisov whispered the command: “Mount!” They formed up; they crossed themselves… “God be with you!” “Hurrah!” rang out through the forest, and one by one, as if pouring from a sack, hundreds of Cossacks, their lances atilt, flew merrily across the brook towards the camp. […]
Posted in War and Peace.
Why good guys sometimes commit ‘war crimes.’ by Warren Kozak [This first appeared as an Opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Dec 22 2009] Five years ago a particularly gruesome image made its way to our television screens from the war in Iraq. Four U.S. civilian contractors working in Fallujah were ambushed and killed […]
Posted in War and Peace.
The passages below are free German-English to readable-English ‘translations’ meant to clarify Clausewitz for the general reader. They are based on material in A Short Guide to Clausewitz on War, edited by R. L. Leonard (1967). Definition War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale. If we would conceive as a unit the […]
Posted in Arts and Letters, For the Record, Notes.
Quadrant, September 2009 It was a day when every book repels, when each title brings a sense of ennui. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution? I don’t think so: out of Mexico always the same thing. The Second Plane? No Martin we’ll give that a miss. What remains to be discovered: mapping the secrets of the […]
Posted in Civilization, Arts and Letters.
Judging from his new book Beauty, Roger Scruton’s idea of a pleasing view would probably be the Wiltshire countryside circa 1750, with some red-coated riders and a fox hurrying into a copse…
Posted in People.
A sense of danger is a wonderful thing — like Darwin said, don’t leave home without it. A sense of danger warns you of the bear in the cave and the shark beyond the breakers…
An Australian writer living in Sydney, Roger Sandall is the author of The Culture Cult (2001), a study of romantic primitivism and its effects. His work has appeared in a number of places including Commentary, The American Interest, Encounter, The New Criterion, The American, Sight and Sound, Quadrant, Art International, The New Lugano Review, The Salisbury Review, Merkur, Mankind, Visual Anthropology, and Social Science and Modern Society.