Books

In the spring and summer of 1667, London began to see some odd goings-on. Seven years after the restoration of King Charles II to the throne — after England’s republican experiment under Oliver Cromwell ended in 1660 — and one year after the Great Fire had laid waste to the city, things were rather tense: the second Anglo-Dutch war was under way and, by the end of June, there would even be the fear of a Dutch invasion making its way up the Thames. But oddly, it wasn’t wars, invasion threats or geopolitical goings-on that caused the great and the good of London society to exchange frantic missives. At the beginning of April, a young man-about town wrote a rollickingly bizarre letter to his father.

The first problem about decolonization is the word itself. Colonization is the process of establishing control over a foreign territory and its indigenous inhabitants, by settlement, conquest or political manipulation. But decolonization? It has come to mean much more than the reversal of that process. Today, it refers to an altogether wider agenda, whose central objective is to discredit or downgrade the cultural achievements of the West. Objective truth and empirical investigation are mere western constructs. They are optional ideas which need have no weight beyond the western societies which invented them. But the West has imposed them on the rest of the world by a process akin to the colonial conquests of the past four centuries.

Here is the opening of a sonnet written by Wilfred Owen in the spring of 1911: “Three colors have I known the Deep to wear;/ ’Tis well today that Purple grandeurs gloom.” Owen was eighteen and had just been on a pilgrimage to Teignmouth in England, where his hero John Keats had once stayed. The kindest thing to say about this poem is that it is heavy with the influence of Keats. Six years later, in a seaside hotel requisitioned by the army and waiting to be sent back to the Western Front, he begins a poem like this: “Sit on the bed. I’m blind, and three parts shell.” This looks so simple. The monosyllables carry the meter without fuss; “shell” here means both munitions and protection.

Ronald Reagan has been dead for nearly twenty years, but sometimes it still feels like he’s still the head of the Republican Party. The fortieth US president has been etched in American folklore as one of the country’s most effective and historic statesman, the man who stared down the Soviet Union and pursued policies that ultimately brought down the so-called “Evil Empire” in December 1991. Republican politicians of all stripes, from presidential aspirants to local councilmembers, utter his name at every opportunity. The first GOP presidential debate took place at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, where multiple candidates looked back at the 1980s as a time when the mighty US shook off the cobwebs from the Vietnam War and rediscovered its self-confidence.

The Roman emperor Domitian began life as a spare. At the end of the first century CE, while his brother Titus was the heir to their father Vespasian, the younger boy’s “sense of resentment and frustration had festered,” writes Tom Holland. “Rather than stay in Rome, where his lack of meaningful responsibility was inevitably felt as something raw,” Domitian moved away with a wife whom his family disliked, “doomed forever to be a supernumerary,” paranoid, attracting gossip, avoiding any company in which “innocent mention of baldness” might be viewed as “mockery of his own receding hairline.” In most judgments by posterity this Prince Harry of the early empire fulfilled all this lack of early promise. Big brother Titus became emperor only briefly.

In the summer of 1955, an unusual meeting took place. Billy Graham visited the writer and academic C.S. Lewis in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalene College, Cambridge. It was unusual because leading British academics typically avoided Southern Baptist revivalists. But rather than encountering a fussy, prim don, Graham found a kind, intelligent scholar who was very happy to spend the afternoon with him. Later, Graham admitted he was intimidated by Lewis, but the English professor quickly dispelled any anxiety, probably by offering Graham a cup of tea. Graham’s impact on American religious culture, for good or ill, is unquestioned, but it is difficult to imagine what that same culture would look like without the works of C.S. Lewis.

In 2020, an American pilot and daredevil named “Mad Mike” Hughes launched himself in a homemade steam-powered rocket, hoping to achieve enough altitude to prove to himself that the Earth was flat. Unfortunately, the rocket crashed and Mad Mike was no more. “I’m not going to take anyone else’s word for it, or NASA, or especially Elon Musk with SpaceX,” he had once explained in an interview. “I’m going to build my own rocket right here and I’m going to see it with my own eyes what shape this world we live on is.” In this way he became a martyr to the modern conspiracy theorist’s mantra: “Do your own research!

Do you ever wish that your young children would stop asking you questions, constantly touching your body and being needy for your love and attention? That’s called being “touched out,” a new-age expression for the Extremely Online mother who can’t seem to reconcile with the idea that her life is going to be different after she has children. It’s also the title of Amanda Montei’s memoir-cum-cultural criticism on how modern motherhood in America is indistinguishable from the pervasive rape culture that permeates every aspect of a woman’s life in the country, including marriage, the workplace and yes, parenthood. Montei’s revelations about motherhood came to her after #MeToo took off.

Christine Blasey Ford is back and ready for more — disbelief, tears? Perhaps all of it. The professor of sociology who testified in 2018 that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had committed sexual assault against her in high school is set to release a memoir this March detailing the trial.   Cockburn suspects your opinion on whether the book will be fiction or nonfiction depends on how you vote, though One Way Back promises to be “the compelling true story behind the testimony that awed the nation.”   According to St. Martin’s Press, the memoir recounts the months leading up to the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing as Ford attempted to get information “into the right hands” without bringing backlash on her friends and family.

When a new book by an author often characterized as a conservative polemicist earns a rave review in the staid Economist, independent thinkers take notice. Christopher Rufo’s articles on recent US radicalism for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal have long attracted wide attention, and now America’s Cultural Revolution has been praised as “meticulous” and “cerebral” as well as “persuasive and well-written.” All true, for Rufo’s book is impressively erudite, reflecting a breadth and depth of familiarity with influential leftist writings that will shame any number of “woke” academics.