William f. buckley

Friday

Rory Sutherland

My points-based system for choosing our leaders

Our esteemed London editor was once excoriated for saying that the public had had enough of experts. "The people of this country have had enough of experts from organizations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong." His remark sits within a fine conservative tradition: there is William F. Buckley, who stated: "I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty." There is Thomas Sowell, who wrote: "Intellectuals are people whose end products are intangible ideas…Whether their ideas turn out to work... is another question entirely." And of course there is Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to read PPE at Oxford.

points

Tuesday

Daniel McCarthy

What would Buckley do?

From our US edition

When Sam Tanenhaus’s monumental biography Buckley was published in June, I began a review by noting that William F. Buckley Jr.’s memory is as ill-served by some of his admirers as it is by his critics. The two have in fact largely converged on a single characterization of National Review’s founder: Buckley as the patron saint of purges, who excommunicated anti-Semites and conspiracists (as one side emphasizes) or antiwar dissenters and populists (as the other sees it) from the conservative movement.

william f. buckley jr

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Racists will love it: National Theatre’s Death of England – Delroy reviewed

Death of England: Delroy is a companion piece to Death of England, which ran in February at the NT and examined the white working classes. Here the focus is on a successful black Briton, Delroy, who votes Tory and feels at home in multicultural society. The charismatic Michael Balogun plays him as a complex, shrewd and humane figure. He likes to mock white people who judge others according to superficialities like accent and pronunciation. And he recalls his horrified excitement when a white girl at school calmly placed her finger inside his boxer shorts. Delroy has plenty of white pals including his girlfriend, Carly, who is expecting their child. The only antisocial voice in his life belongs to his mother, a Jamaican bigot, who objects to Carly’s ethnicity.