Peter Hitchens reviews John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism: “This brief, dry, droll book contains many enjoyable mockeries of various earnest and ridiculous (and failed) attempts to create substitutes for religion, from Auguste Comte to Ayn Rand, who seems to have turned smoking into a sort of sacrament. Even more enjoyably, Gray teases those who try to build a morality on evolution by natural selection, pointing out how that theory has been used in the past to justify what its modern supporters would rightly denounce as appalling racial bigotry and perhaps worse than that. He reminds us of T. H. Huxley’s typically clear-eyed and undeceived warning that evolution ‘is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before’…Well, this sort of thing is what slim volumes are for, an agreeable display of cleverness and deep knowledge lightly worn, ending with a gust of superior laughter at the silliness of mankind. Yet I ended it feeling a little sorry for its ultimate aridity, which seems to say that, while there is in truth some great thing we cannot grasp, it narrows our minds to try too seriously to do so.”
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Steven Poole reviews Lucy Inglis’s history of opium: “The author’s style is perky and informal, which can result in her writing such things as ‘the drug is both a tremendous force for good and an indescribable evil’ — which, if true, is a shame, because it would be a decent idea to try to describe it. In fact, Inglis is throughout rather unattractively moralistic about her subject. She describes Coleridge ‘misusing’ laudanum, as if the poor sap had been in the habit of pouring it over his head, and endorses Southey’s criticism of the greater man’s ‘indulgence’. Coleridge died ‘an unhappy addict’, Inglis concludes with satisfaction, though it bears pointing out that he had written some rather good poetry and criticism along the way. She also describes the long life of the great De Quincey as ‘riven by disputes, nightmares, debt and drug dependence’, which again is rather to miss the literary point. For an investigation into why people use opium and other substances recreationally in the first place, one must look elsewhere —for example to Richard J. Miller’s excellent Drugged: The Science and Culture Behind Psychotropic Drugs. Inglis, for her part, just seems consistently baffled as to why anyone might want to get off their face. She is still surprised when relating how Hunter S. Thompson had ‘few regrets’ about his pharmacological adventures; but a line of his explains something about the attraction of altered states of mind that these 400 pages otherwise cannot. ‘I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone,’ Thompson is supposed to have said, ‘but they’ve always worked for me.’”
Bruegel’s earthy and metaphysical art: “Bruegel the elder, the paterfamilias of a clan that would number some 15 significant artists over the course of 150 years, was born in Breda in what is now the Netherlands in 1525, and spent much of his working life in nearby Antwerp. He seems to us a one-off, standing outside the artistic currents of the time, but when he visited Italy and Sicily in the early 1550s Michelangelo and Titian were still at work and Tintoretto and Veronese were forging careers, as he was. Nevertheless, Bruegel was not a Renaissance artist in the accepted sense. He was a religious artist who didn’t paint for churches, a painter of people who gave equal precedence to landscapes, an artist who treated the comic as well as the grave, someone who painted both life and death — carnival and apocalypse — with the same intensity.”
Barry Strauss praises Andrew Roberts’s “masterful biography” of Churchill.
Essay of the Day
Did you know that F. Scott Fitzgerald was fascinated with the middle ages and wrote a handful of stories set in medieval Europe? Jeff Sypeck has tracked down all of the novelist’s “Philippe” stories and writes about them in a delightful four-part series:
“[I]n the waning years of his too-short life, Fitzgerald published four medieval-themed short stories in the women’s magazine Redbook in the hope of turning them into his great comeback work: Philippe, Count of Darkness, a novel set in ninth-century France.
“The Philippe stories take effort to locate and patience to read. Fitzgerald’s daughter, I’ve learned, thought they were awful, and only one has been reprinted. I tracked down the necessary back issues of Redbook, half-expecting to find that these stories were the El Dorado of forgotten American medievalism, legends that inspired only folly—but after a few clicks on Ebay it was in my hands: the first story, ‘In the Darkest Hour,’ from the October 1934 issue, where evocative illustrations by Saul Tepper make you long for more from the facing-page ads for soup, sink cleaner, and booze.
“What can I tell you about ‘In the Darkest Hour’? It’s so unlike anything I’ve read by Fitzgerald that if I hadn’t seen his byline on the cover of its crumbling original source, I wouldn’t believe he had written it.”
Photo: Hallstatt
Poem: Bill Coyle, “It Never Ceases to Unnerve Me”
