The historical approach to English Literature “has been destroyed at Cambridge and is now being destroyed at Oxford too. This is done by a compact, well-organized group of whom [F.R.] Leavis is the head. It now has a stranglehold on the schools as well as the universities (and the High Brow press). It is too open and avowed to be called a plot. It is much more like a political party – or Inquisition. Leavis himself is something (in the long run) more fatal than a villain. He is a perfectly sincere, disinterested, fearless, ruthless fanatic. I am sure he would, if necessary, die for his critical principles: I am afraid he might also kill for them. Ultimately, a pathological type – unhappy, intense, mirthless. Incapable of conversation: dead silence or prolonged, passionate, and often irrelevant, monologue are his only two lines.”

A letter from C.S. Lewis to J.B. Priestley on September 18, 1962, quoted in Harry Lee Poe The Completion of C.S. Lewis

“This rock [Plymouth Rock] has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen fragments carefully preserved in several American cities. Does not that clearly prove that man’s power and greatness resides entirely in his soul? A few poor souls trod for an instant on this rock, and it has become famous; it is prized by a great nation; fragments are venerated, and tiny pieces distributed far and wide. What has become of the doorsteps of a thousand palaces? Who cares about them?”

Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America (Lawrence’s translation) [though giving I think a bit too much credit to the Pilgrims in his talk of Puritans]

“That was by no means the first time the question had arisen whether he was more pigheaded than I was strong-minded.”

Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue re himself and Nero Wolfe in Rex Stout “Murder is Corny” in Trio for Blunt Instruments

“The reasonable people (for I know some quite reasonable people who allow me to talk to them), the rationalists, the liberal progressive people all say, ‘The Indian need is Independence; it must be a self-governing unit,’ and so on. Then they both say, ‘Let us hope no silly squabbles about religion will spoil this great unity,’ whether Imperial or National. Now I am so perverse that I think the religious squabbles are much less silly than the political squabbles. I am much more certain that there is such a thing as Islam than there is such a thing as India. I believe much more in the existence of a Hindoo than in the existence of an Indian. And I think the difficulties do arise from the doctrines; but much more from the trick of ignoring the doctrines.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Thing They Left Out” in the New York American January 9, 1932 reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

In my latest National Post column I discuss the very good reason Israelis made a very bad deal.

“Ideas and values, not location or weather, were what distinguished the Greeks.”

Victor Davis Hanson The Wars of the Ancient Greeks

“the type of modern idealism is a very narrow type. As Stevenson said, modern civilisation is ‘a dingy, ungentlemanly business. It leaves so much out of a man.’ In the old romances it was the villain that was monotonous. In the old melodramas it was the villain who always looked the same. His black moustache, eyeglass, and cigarette, were a sort of uniform of the infernal service. But the good men were of all conceivable shapes and colours – and some rather inconceivable. Don Quixote was a good man, and starved himself; Mr. Pickwick was a good man, and did not object to milk punch; Sam Weller was a good man, and did not object to pretty housemaids; the Master of Ravenswood was a good man and got drowned; Sidney Carton was a good man and got drunk; Benedick is a good man in Much Ado About Nothing; and so is the Friar in Romeo and Juliet. The old masters maintain the gayest miscellaneousness in good men by having one black stick to represent bad men. It was like the patches that their ladies put upon their complexions. That one black spot threw up and set free all the changing colours and contours of real health. But to-day we are drifting to the opposite extreme. We are getting only one kind of good man – one who approves of international peace, one who is quite in favour of social reform, one who thinks there should be a minimum wage, but also a court of arbitration – enough, you know him. And we have got around us, on the other hand, every antic and extravagance of the evil man; varieties which none of the old romancers could have conceived, or would have been permitted to describe. I confess I prefer the old-time notice-boards warning men off particular precipices and swamps in what is in other respects a rolling and romantic land of liberty.”

G.K. Chesterton in The Eye Witness March 7, 1912 reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023)

In my latest Epoch Times column I mocked progressive alarm at Jordan Peterson daring to interview Pierre Poilievre, and at either man daring to exist. But I then expressed my own alarm at the way Poilievre makes plausibly right-wing noises without articulating genuine policy alternatives on major issues.