Reviews and News:
What can Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent tell us about terrorism today? “Conrad had a deep-rooted fear of social disorder, was sensitive to political movements and perceptive about the pathology of terrorists. People asked the same questions about terrorists then as they do now: What sort of people are they? Who organizes them? What are their motives? Though Conrad’s novel is based on the anarchist bomb plots of the turn of the 20th century, his political insights apply with equal force to our situation today. An adaptation of the novel is now airing on BBC One and the series will likely appear in America.”
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How the left stole “social justice.”
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America is a country of cars, but the bicycle has also made a mark. David Skinner reviews The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life.
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A look back at the international jet set in old Shanghai.
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In Case You Missed It:
One of the principal problems with gender studies is that it cannot account for difference: “When I recently asked a class of undergraduates at Oglethorpe University if any of them thought there were ‘no meaningful differences between men and women,’ two female students raised their hands. When I pointed to the obvious reproductive differences between males and females, which give young women the unique ability to conceive and bear children, they looked at me as if I had committed an act of hurtful bigotry.”
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Another Elizabeth I: “Elizabeth sanctioned, and even encouraged, the activities of the notorious Catholic-hunter and rackmaster Richard Topcliffe, who tortured suspects in a “strong room” in his house in Westminster. Indeed, ‘strong archival evidence exists that she knew him personally, thoroughly approved of his activities and received reports directly from him rather than through intermediaries’. The smoking gun which proves her acquiescence in some of Topcliffe’s worst atrocities lies buried in Burghley’s papers. When the Jesuit priest Robert Southwell was arrested in 1592, Topcliffe wrote to tell Elizabeth how the prisoner was shackled to the wall in his ‘strong chamber’ and had responded to interrogation ‘foully and suspiciously’. Topcliffe sought the Queen’s permission to ‘enforce’ the prisoner ‘to answer truly and directly’, by stretching him out against the wall using ‘hand gyves’ (iron gauntlets). Although the Queen’s reply to Topcliffe’s letter was not written down, the fact that he proceeded with the torture methods he had described and with no further warrant as the law required, is in Guy’s view ‘chilling proof that she gave her consent in the full knowledge of what he was about to do. Topcliffe would not have dared to act as he did had the Queen forbidden it, and she was far from squeamish’. Moreover, when, after a two and a half years of solitary confinement in the Tower of London, Robert Southwell was finally brought to the gallows at Tyburn, Elizabeth specificallyordered that he be forced to endure extra suffering, and after being hanged, Southwell should be cut down while fully conscious and disembowelled. This was no one-off. Ten years earlier, she had issued similar orders when William Parry, a failed assassin, made the journey to Tyburn. After just one swing of the rope he was cut down from the gallows on Elizabeth’s order and while he was still fully conscious, had his heart and bowels ripped from his body with a meat cleaver. Finally, after he had let out a ‘great groan’, his head and limbs were severed from the corpse and the head set on London Bridge as a warning to others of the ‘terrible price of treason’. So much for Good Queen Bess.”
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The mirrors behind Rembrandt’s paintings? “In a paper published Wednesday in the Journal of Optics, Mr. O’Neill lays out a theory that Rembrandt set up flat and concave mirrors to project his subjects — including himself — onto surfaces before painting or etching them. By tracing these projections, the 17th-century painter would have been able to achieve a higher degree of precision, Mr. O’Neill said. His research suggests that some of Rembrandt’s most prominent work may not have been done purely freehand, as many art historians believe.”
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Revisiting the Great Hound Match of 1905: “Some disputes simply cannot be resolved by rational debate but must be settled in the field, and by blood. Alabama and Auburn people can, for instance, argue 364 days of the year about which ‘program’ is superior. Then, on the 365th, all the calls to Paul Finebaum’s radio show will be forgotten and the test of arms will be conclusive. So it was in 1905 when the burning issue was—which was the superior foxhound: the one bred according to British standard, or the more recent version that had come along in what many a fox-hunting man back in the mother country still surely thought of as ‘the colonies.’ There were two fox-hunting men who advocated for their dogs and arranged a showdown. In Virginia. And in that part of the state, to be precise, that is known as ‘hunt country.'”
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Classic Essay: Dwight MacDonald, “Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty'”
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Interview: Harvey Mansfield and Leon Kass talk about the Ten Commandments (HT: Adam White)
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