When the 751 Members of the new European Parliament (MEPs) gather in the French city of Strasbourg on July 2, the largest national group present in all the EU will be the MEPs of Britain’s new Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage. While the 29 newly elected Brexit Party MEPs intend to upend the EU,...
The fire that gutted Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris during Holy Week was no doubt caused by nothing more banal than negligent builders doing restoration work on the roof. Nevertheless it compelled all of us to search for a deeper explanation. A Gothic masterpiece begun in 1163, Notre Dame has become an icon of European...
To judge from what is going on in Italy, the only major European country where populists are in power, right-wing populism works, but left-wing populism does not. Populism, they tell us, is a meaningless word. What else, after all, can populism mean but what is popular? And so, so what? Nevertheless, populism does exist. Here...
The bitter war of words that has taken place the best part of this past year between France and Italy culminated in the French government taking the extraordinary step of withdrawing its ambassador to Rome in February. On one level, this drôle de guerre is between two governments which hold dramatically different views of the...
About 50 miles south and east of Rome, high in the Apennine mountains, lies the Charterhouse of Trisulti whose isolated magnificence prompted the German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius (who stumbled upon it in the 1850’s) to write in his classic work Years of Wandering in Italy, “If a place exists where the human spirit can reach...
One of the easiest-to-diagnose symptoms of the existential crisis that is causing the decline and fall of Western civilization is the deepening disconnect between peoples and governments. A perfect example is Britain, where in the 2016 Brexit referendum 17.4 million people voted to leave the European Union (a clear-cut majority of 52 percent on a...
Events this past week in Paris remind me of my step-sister Amanda, Lady Harlech, who is usually described—much to her chagrin—as the “muse” of the 85-year-old gay kaiser of the fashion world, Karl Lagerfeld. On Thursday—Thanksgiving Day in America—Lagerfeld switched on the Christmas lights in the Champs-Élysées. He had been invited to do so by...
The writing is at long last on the wall for a world-famous migrant utopia that was founded in a tiny medieval town overlooking the Ionian Sea. It has been a con from start to finish. The little town of Riace in Calabria on the toe of Italy has been eulogized by the global left for...
Italian journalists are forbidden these days from using the Italian word for foreign migrants who have stolen their way by subterfuge into Italy. By controlling which words people can use you can control their thought. It is a thoroughly fascist idea and therefore much adored by the liberal left. You use the law to criminalize...
The collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa on the motorway that links Italy to Monte Carlo and the French Riviera reminds me of one of the great American novels: The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Here’s my attempt to modify the memorable first sentence of Thornton Wilder’s 1927 masterpiece about the role of God...
A personal and national narrative of resistance to globalism Twenty years ago I somehow managed to get my act together and get out of Paris, where I had haunted a cheap hotel for a year in the wake of the death of Princess Diana like the ghost of the Marlon Brando character in Last Tango...