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2 months ago | 
thecritic.co.uk | Daniel Johnson
This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. Monarchy and dictatorship both imply one ruler. Yet they are quite different institutions. Monarchies are not always hereditary — think of the elective Holy Roman Empire and the papacy — but they are intended to be permanent, established by the grace of God, anointed like priests at their coronation.
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Dec 21, 2024 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Daniel Johnson
Intellectual history, sneered at in Oxford 40 years ago, is all the rage there now This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. In a year that has seen more history in the making than most, several outstanding books have come from our historians.
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Nov 16, 2024 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Daniel Johnson
This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. Few catchphrases have enjoyed as long a shelf-life as the “German economic miracle”. Even though Wirtschaftswunder sounds better in German, the connotations of the miraculous were disliked by Ludwig Erhard, the hard-headed economics minister who masterminded the post-war West German recovery.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Daniel Johnson
This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. Ockham’s eponymous razor is still as incisive as it was when first wielded by the English friar and scholastic philosopher six centuries ago. William of Ockham (1287–1347) was a pioneer of the theory of knowledge and the great proponent of nominalism, arguing that universal concepts were merely names, not realities.
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Aug 26, 2024 | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Daniel Johnson |Christopher Caldwell |David Azerrad |Theodore Dalrymple
In the international academy, Sir Christopher Clark is as grand as it gets. The Australian historian made his name with Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (2006), which sought to demolish the idea that German history had followed a Sonderweg, or “special path,” culminating in the Nazis. A decade ago, The Sleepwalkers (2012), his history of the First World War, became a bestseller.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Daniel Johnson
This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. History records nothing more vile than Hitler and his henchmen. At the height of his power in 1942, Heinrich Himmler boasted that “the Führer has laid this very serious command [extermination of the Jews in occupied eastern Europe] upon my shoulders.
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Aug 14, 2024 | 
newpol.org | Daniel Johnson |Shannon Ikebe
Censorship in the United States is back. In 2022–2023, PEN America recorded 3,362 book-banning incidents, a 33 percent increase over 2021–2022. As well as ridding public schools of immoral content—including, in addition to “sexually explicit” material, books on physical abuse, health and well-being, and themes of grief and death—the new McCarthyites have worked for the passage of numerous state-level laws censoring teachers and subjects.
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Jul 4, 2024 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Daniel Johnson
Reflecting upon the corrosive power of disillusionment in politics and why our leaders are virtue vacuums who lack both competence and character This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. The German word for “disappointment” is Enttäuschung, which strictly translates as “disillusionment”.
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Jun 15, 2024 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Daniel Johnson
This article is taken from the June 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. The history of history is often derided, even by historians, as mere prolegomenon to the study of the past. And yet it supplies the key to unlock the mystery of why where we come from matters to us at all. Superficially, Oswyn Murray is the archetypal Oxford don, with the progressive baggage that being a Fellow of Balliol implies.
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Jun 14, 2024 | 
engelsbergideas.com | Daniel Johnson
James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist, Jeffrey Meyers, LSU Press, $34.95James Salter (1925-2015) was the last great postwar American writer and one of the last true heroes of ‘the greatest generation’. Yet he is still not well known in Britain and much of the Anglophone world. Almost a decade after his death, it is high time for a biography that places him in his proper literary, historical and personal context.
