Books
Levelling the playing field
Questioning the status of history’s ‘most dangerous’ spy
A reckoning for justice
Thomas Grant’s “Court Number One” reveals the changing values of the society which the criminal justice system ultimately exists to enforce
Humanity on the move
‘An ominous development in the “unsettling” of Europe is the increasing restriction on what may be said about migration, and the increasingly strict policing of language’
Routed by liberalism
How usury killed Christendom
Emulation and evisceration
Noel Malcolm tells the story of western intellectual fascination with the Ottoman empire from the fall of Constantinople in 1453
What was she thinking?
“Though de Beauvoir and Sartre never tied the knot, their relationship, with its jealousies and enmities and silent rages, looks like the worst kind of marriage”
Agencies of disruption
“Heidi Tworek’s shrewd, erudite and timely News from Germany is a work of historical analysis that can also be read as a corrective to the dangerous hysteria over the information games—fake news and all the rest—currently being played over the internet.”
Charisma and catastrophe
“How could one of the most civilised societies on earth become the instrument of a mind of such malice? I confess that my heart sank at the thought of spending any more hours in the company of this personification of radical evil. Yet we cannot wholly avert our eyes”
The pedant of Pompeii
“If you start your account with such a humdinging narrative as the eruption of Vesuvius, then nothing is ever going to be as gripping again”
Rabelais and the likely lads
A posthumous collection of poems by Geoffrey Hill embodies a controversial but impassioned idea of what poetry is and does
The West slumbers as its enemies run amok
Profound weaknesses leave us open to political warfare from Russia and China—weaknesses which they are ruthlessly exploiting
Routed by liberalism
How usury killed Christendom
Offences and defences
‘Standpoint is, as it has always been, a magazine for small-c conservatives and small-l liberals. But it is also for small-s socialists and small-g greens, and for those who resist pigeonholing on principle’