Welcome to Standpoint

Welcome to StandpointOnline, the internet home of Standpoint magazine. Our fourth issue hits the newstands in the UK on Thursday August 28th and copies of our third issue should now be available in the USA. As well as a significant portion of the print magazine's content, StandpointOnline features a variety of blogs and web-only essays and articles. We welcome your opinions on Standpoint and look forward to hearing from you.

Writers, Visible and Invisible

September 2008

Writers are hidden beings, says the winner of the 2008 PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Achievement Award

Writers’ invisibility has little or nothing to do with Fame, just as Fame has little or nothing to do with Literature. (Fame merits its capital F for its fickleness, Literature its capital L for its lastingness.) Thespians, celebrities and politicians, whose appetite for bottomless draughts of public acclaim, much of it manufactured, is beyond any normal measure, may feed hotly on Fame – but Fame is always a product of the present culture: topical and variable, hence ephemeral. Writers are made otherwise. What writers prize is simpler, quieter and more enduring than clamorous Fame: it is recognition. Fame, by and large, is an accountant’s category, tallied in Amazonian sales. Recognition, hushed and inherent in the silence of the page, is a reader’s category: its stealth is its wealth.

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Rethinking the War on Terror

September 2008

The presidential adviser and author of Terror and Consent, Philip Bobbitt, shares his ideas on the war on terror in a Standpoint dialogue with Conservative politician and author of Celsius 7/7, Michael Gove

Daniel Johnson: I thought we’d start with Philip’s striking thesis in Terror and Consent that everything we thought we knew about terrorism and how to deal with it is obsolete and we must start again. It’s a very radical view. Why do you think that?

Philip Bobbitt: Terrorism is the name of an epiphenomenon, a symptom of the state. Different constitutional cultures and orders produce different forms of terrorism. Perhaps the most vulnerability-making quality of our constitutional culture is our refusal to realise that it and the kind of terrorism it produces are undergoing a fundamental change. So we bring the habits of mind of a century of success against terrorism and they are just as inappropriate as those of the French knights  who walked onward to Agincourt.

DJ: Michael, what do you think of that? Can the British claim to have learnt something with their long struggle with the IRA?

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Arrivederci Roma

September 2008

The public and government mood towards immigrants, whether legal or illegal, is increasingly ugly

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Panic at the Palace

September 2008

Rarely have expectations and realistic possibilities been so ill-matched as in Sudan

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France Finally Forgets Vichy

September 2008

The humiliation of 1940 has cast a baleful shadow over France's postwar history. Can Nicolas Sarkozy, the first president too young to be tainted by it, usher in a new era?

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The End of 'Chimerica'

September 2008

The delicate balance of power between China and American is unstable and the geopolitical consequences will affect us all

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What Do We Mean by 'Art'?

September 2008

Art is not culture or entertainment, it is complexity, the 'I' in life, ambition, the ambiguity of humanity, serious about itself

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Let Them Eat Brioches

September 2008

The Patisserie Wars are expanding at least as rapidly as the nation's waistbands

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