Under Consideration: Benny Morris, 1948: The First Arab Israeli War, Yale University Press (2008), 524 pages. Back in the late 1980s and 90s, Benny Morris was identified, some would say targeted, as the stormy petrel among Israeli historians. In tomes such as The Birth of the Palestinian Problem (1988), Israel’s Border Wars (1993), and Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab … [Read More]

Indiana Jones was born in 1899 which would make him 102-year old on September 11, 2001 and which explains why he couldn’t be taking part in the war against Islamo-Fascism in 2008 in the new “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” that was released last week. And that’s too bad. Just imagine a plot in which Osama bin … [Read More]

Had Britain not declared war on Aug. 4 and brought in Japan, Italy and the United States, the war would have ended far sooner. Leninism and Stalinism would never have triumphed in Russia, and Hitler would never have come to power in Germany. The second blunder was the vengeful Treaty of Versailles that added a million square miles to the British … [Read More]

It was as inevitable as the proverbial death and taxes, or John Podhoretz ordering four pizzas. The true impetus behind the Iraqi invasion, the trillions spent, the hundreds of thousand dead Iraqis, and four thousand of our own, was conservatism—not the neocons. That old bag, the New York Times, has just given a glowing review to a book by one Peter … [Read More]

As the twentieth century ended, a debate ensued over who had been its greatest man. The Weekly Standard nominee was Churchill. Not only was he Man of the Century, said scholar Harry Jaffa, he was the Man of Many Centuries. To Kissinger he was “the quintessential hero.” A BBC poll of a million people in 2002 found that Britons considered Churchill … [Read More]

The latest issue of The American Conservative has a surprisingly negative review of Pat Buchanan’s latest book, Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost an Empire and the West Lost the World by John Lukacs. Well actually, it isn’t that surprising to me.  Allow me to explain why. The question that I guess most lay-readers are asking: “Isn’t this … [Read More]

Is the opening sentence of a book, especially a novel, the most consequential, or is it just dressing for the feast to come? I’d say the former judging from A Tale of Two Cities, Moby-Dick, Pride and Prejudice, and my favourite, The Death of Manolete, by Barnaby Conrad. “In August, 1947, in Linares, Spain, a multimillionaire and a bull killed each … [Read More]

At the end of the Cold War, conservatives found themselves in a state of disunity and intellectual ferment. The neoconservative faction demanded a continuation of the Cold War model of interventionist foreign policy and rejected the domestic small government conservatism popular in the South and West.  Neo-nationalists, such as Pat Buchanan, pushed for a turn inward, the rejection of various liberal … [Read More]

Quebec, la belle province, was once a land as Christ-haunted as Flannery O’Connor’s American South, with classical parish churches at the heart of towns and cities, and crucifixes in classrooms, courtrooms, and most prominently looking down from on high above the Speaker’s Chair in the Parliament of Quebec. (Alfred Hitchcock’s “I Confess” superbly depicts Quebec’s Catholic society in the 1950s). While … [Read More]

I know this is supposed to be a lifestyle column, but each week I seem to find out that one or more of the habits which makes my life liveable could also possibly kill me. Last week it was eating and drinking. I responded by cutting my booze consumption by 5/7ths (e.g. I only get tipsy on weekends), and that’s working … [Read More]