This book, originally published in Czech in 1973, is based on an amusing literary conceit. Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, an English Catholic priest and important early 20th-century theologian, was also a distinctive figure in the development of the genre of detective fiction. A pretty fair writer of detective stories himself, he also (for instance) wrote a...
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“Enemies of Society”
“The essential matter of history is not what happened but what people thought or said about it.” —Frederic Maitland In the late summer of 1985, the San Francisco Bay area celebrated the 40th anniversary of VJ Day and the end of World War II. Part of the celebration consisted of a cavalcade of American Navy...
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Caution: Historical Revisionism at Work
“He who controls the past controls the future.” Nowhere is Big Brother’s dictum truer than in the case of Vietnam and the antiwar movement. Lately, one can detect a new and persistent attempt to remold the history and goals of the antiwar movement in a way designed to make it more acceptable to. the mass...
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Burned but Never Consumed
The first writer known to have made the outrageous accusation of ritual cannibalism against the Jews was a pagan Greek named Apion. But it was the Christians who established prejudice against and hatred for Jews as a fixture of Western civilization. The Christians’ animus against the Jews derived from the idea that “the Jews” had...
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A Prince of Our Disorder
“Very few care for beauty; but anyone can be interested in gossip.” —C.S. Lewis In 1982 The Village Voice published an article accusing the famous Polish emigre writer Jerzy Kosinski of being a fraud. The authors (Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith) argued that Kosinski’s novels had all received extensive and unacknowledged “help” from various editorial...
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Revenge of the Nerd
“He can be compelled who does not know how to die.” —Seneca “That’s IT. I’ve HAD it with bourgeois-liberal guilt!” In disgust, my friend slammed Lillian Rubin’s new book back across the table at me. We had been reading a hospital scene (one of many) from Quiet Rage, Rubin’s account of the Bernhard Goetz case:...
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Myths of Imperialism
“The day of small nations has long passed away. The day of Empires has come.” —Joseph Chamberlain In a rational world, the term “imperialism” might have been a carefully defined and useful tool of political and social analysis, part of the study of how empires come into being. But the story of “imperialism” is typical...
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Lillian Hellman, True and False
“Female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage.” —Shaw In a recent issue of The Nation, John L. Hess complains about the current flow of books demythologizing the venerated martyrs of the American left. So what if new historical research suggests that the Rosenbergs (or at least one of them) were actually guilty? So what...
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The Glory and the Myth of John Ford
A year ago, the University of Maryland held a special screening of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), followed by a two-hour discussion of the film led by representatives of the departments of history, English, philosophy, and communications. John Ford would have been publicly contemptuous of this attention from the egghead professors. In private, he probably...
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Germania Tremens
“What wonders I have done, all Germany can witness. . . . “ —Christopher Marlowe Anyone who has lived in Germany eventually realizes that Germany is a nation of hypochondriacs. Germans spend far more than Americans on nostrums, vitamins, tranquilizers, and elixers; Americans may watch “Dynasty,” but the most popular TV show in the Federal...
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Inside Jokes
From August 1941 until November 1943, George Orwell served as the producer and writer of a radio talk show beamed by the BBC out to India. Physically unfit for army duty, he considered the job to be his way of “doing his bit” in the war against Hitler. The image of Orwell as a chief...
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Sympathy for the Devil
Abbott Redux One would have thought to have heard the last of Jack Henry Abbott. Back in the early 1980’s, you’ll remember, Jack Abbott was a literary cause celèbre: here was a great, lost writer, condemned to an unending and unfair prison term, but discovered and redeemed by Norman Mailer. True, Abbott had murdered a...
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The Mystery of Arthur Koestler
“It is notgood to look too long upon these turning wheels of vicissitude, lest we become giddy.” –Sir Francis Bacon It was apt that 1984, the Orwellian Year, should see the reissue of Arthur Koestler’s two-volume autobiog raphy (first published some three dec ades ago) and that the year should also see the...
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Our Orwell, Right or Left
“Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.” —Charles Peguy In Moscow in 1963, there was a saying: “Tell me what you think of Solzhenitsyn and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and I’ll tell you who you are.” A similar principle applies today among Western intellectuals and their opinion of George Orwell and Nineteen...