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2 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Chilton Williamson
Laramie, WyomingAmericans are infamous on the eastern side of the Atlantic for knowing little or nothing about European culture, history and politics – and for being proud of the fact, as Richard Hofstadter, the late Columbia historian, described in them in Anti-intellectualism in American Life, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1964.
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2 weeks ago | 
spectator.com.au | Chilton Williamson
Laramie, WyomingAmericans are infamous on the eastern side of the Atlantic for knowing little or nothing about European culture, history and politics – and for being proud of the fact, as Richard Hofstadter, the late Columbia historian, described in them in Anti-intellectualism in American Life, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1964.
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Chilton Williamson
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Anne Sebba |Chilton Williamson |Philip Hensher |Henry Hitchings
What’s in a name? Well, if it’s Einstein, quite a lot. For Roberto Einstein, it was to prove a devastating connection, even though he had lived in Italy all his adult life, was married to an Italian Christian woman, Nina, with whom he had two children who regularly attended church, and was father to two motherless nieces who were brought up Catholic.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Chilton Williamson |Cressida Bonas |Ben Domenech |Amber Duke
Considering the way history has been going for the past quarter of a century, it seems not merely Panglossian but naive and sentimental to the point of bad taste to find grounds for historical optimism now. Nevertheless, positive facts ought to be recognized as well as negative, and without embarrassment.
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Dec 26, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Chilton Williamson
It seems likely that on Election Day the country entered fully upon the new political era that commenced with the fateful presidential election of 2016. Donald Trump spent the last four years in the howling political wilderness, savagely set upon by every species of Big Beast — legal, financial and political — but from which he emerged as a survivor — physically, mentally and morally intact to achieve what is acknowledged to be the greatest political comeback in American history. Donald J.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Chilton Williamson |Mark Galeotti |Matthew Lynn |Ross Anderson
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana wrote in The Life of Reason, published in 1905. The philosopher’s aphorism, somewhat hackneyed after nearly a century and a quarter, and always true only in a limited way, assumes that men are capable of directing history to a certain end, while diverting it from other ones. Santayana was a very wise man and certainly no ideologue. Nevertheless, his maxim shares something with ideological thinking.
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Oct 21, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Chilton Williamson |Freddy Gray |Andrew Sullivan |Roger Kimball
The Joy of Sex, by the appropriately named Alex Comfort, was a bestselling illustrated sex manual published in 1972 and released in a new edition in 2008. In 2024, anyone with sufficient imagination to describe and illustrate The Joy of Politics would beat out Elon Musk in the race to become the world’s first trillionaire.
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Oct 13, 2024 | 
catholicworldreport.com | Chilton Williamson |J. Ziegler
(Image: Warren Wong/Unsplash.com)The thesis of God: The Science, the Proofs: The Dawn of a Revolution (not yet available in English translation) is summarized, simply and directly, on pages 507-508 by the Australian-British physicist Paul Davies:The temptation to believe that the universe is the product of a sort of design, a manifestation of a subtle mathematical-aesthetic arbitration, is overwhelming.
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Sep 12, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Chilton Williamson |James Delingpole |Ian O’Doherty |Charles Lipson
The last presidential election was one in which the term “popular front” took on new meaning owing to the Covid pandemic and a political contest that would have proved anomalous at any point — given the state of an opposition party badly compromised by the aging, uninspired, uninspiring and unpopular political hacks at the top of the party hierarchy and its radicalization over the previous four years by “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Seeking a “moderate” Democrat with a better chance at...
