Oliver Kamm

May 1, 2024 | quillette.com | Oliver Kamm

The historian Sir Lewis Namier is rarely read these days yet one of his insights perfectly encapsulates the methods of his discipline. “The crowning attainment of historical study,” he maintained, is to achieve “an intuitive sense of how things do not happen.” These words were quoted by Richard Hofstadter in his classic essay (and my source for this quote) “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” as a warning against conspiratorial fantasists who lack such an understanding.

Jan 5, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Oliver Kamm

Pilger was a polemicist who went out looking for what he wanted to find Credit: REUTERS/Neil Hall “I admired the force of his writing, even when I often didn’t support what he wrote, and he was always warm when we met.” So wrote John Simpson, the veteran BBC foreign affairs correspondent, on news of the death of the campaigning journalist John Pilger on December 30 at the age of 84. Those who know of Pilger’s work only in recent years and from the obscure far-Left websites that published it...

Jan 5, 2024 | msn.com | Oliver Kamm

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Jan 4, 2024 | thejc.com | Oliver Kamm

In an unprecedented emergency for Israel, this truth bears stressing: “The simple fact is that all schemes for political appeasement and economic cooperation must fail unless there is an unequivocal voice from us that we will not allow the state to be annihilated and that we will not judge its desperate efforts to gain some strategic security… as an illegitimate use of force.” These words were written not in recent weeks but in 1957, in the US magazine The New Republic, by Reinhold Niebuhr,...

Jan 3, 2024 | capx.co | Oliver Kamm

His plagiarised defence of Milosevic represented the nadir of his career Throughout his life, the celebrated journalist concealed facts and said things he knew to be untrue Sympathy for the dead does not necessitate sentimentality about deceit and indifference to human suffering ‘I admired the force of his writing, even when I often didn’t support what he wrote, and he was always warm when we met.’ So wrote John Simpson, the veteran BBC foreign affairs correspondent, on news of the death of...