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Writing My Autobiography

“Are you still writing?” he asked. “I am,” I answered. “What are you working on at the moment?” “An autobiography,” I said. “Interesting,” he replied. “Whose?” The implication here, you will note, is that mine hasn’t been a life sufficiently interesting to merit an . . . . Continue Reading »

Suicide of the Radical Right​

On May 21, 2013, the French writer Dominique Venner took his own life in front of the main altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Venner was seventy-eight years old when he put a handgun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. He left a note on the altar to explain his “gesture,” which took . . . . Continue Reading »

Hegel Vindicated

Klaus Vieweg’s eight-hundred-page biography of Hegel made something of a sensation when the German original appeared in 2019. More lies have been told about Hegel than about any other philosopher, Vieweg averred, and the biggest lie of all painted Hegel as an apologist for the Prussian . . . . Continue Reading »

Joan of Arc, Gender Theorist

When the nineteen-year-old Joan of Arc was told she would be burned at the stake, she reacted with horror—not for the reasons you or I might give, but on more mysterious grounds. According to the Dominican friar Jean Toutmouillé, who visited her at the prison in Rouen on the morning of May . . . . Continue Reading »

Standing in the Cold

Winter is a bad time. Whether for a season or for a life, it dampens the self. Or so a recent writer claimed. “Mankind endured a long winter of the Dark Ages” for a thousand years, “repressing” the human spirit in a barren season that lasted centuries. The human individual, as fate would . . . . Continue Reading »

Letters

I very much enjoyed Armin Rosen’s essay about the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (“Tarkovksy’s Sublime Terror,” October 2023), but I’m afraid he has made an error of fact about Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia. Rosen says the protagonist, Andrei Gorchakov, “swallows poison and then . . . . Continue Reading »

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