Language
Pax Britannica
‘Britain’s best hope of renewing and defending Western civilisation is to recognise that the English language has conquered the world without a drop of blood being spilt’
No French Please
Sacre bleu! Why bother learning any French when in France you’ll just be humiliated? Let’s study Mandarin, or Arabic, or Spanish in schools instead.
Lost in Translation
As has been the case for hundreds of years, the appointment of Pope Francis was announced in Latin. But the BBC and Sky News didn’t know their quas from their elbows
Why Do Precious Leftists Loathe Tolkien’s Shire?
The author of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit was a great conservative writer
My Five Husbands
A new short story by Joseph Epstein
Reasons
New poetry by Sarah Skwire
“Weary of Silence, Soon Sickened by Words”
Delving into the various linguistic predicaments of Samuel Beckett reveals the beautiful complications of his writings.
Native Tongue-tied
Learning a foreign tongue opens up an entirely new spectrum of cultural rewards, yet state schools are failing to emphasise their importance
Continental Philosophies
Review of The Appointment by Herta Müller; Perlmann’s Silence by Pascal Mercier; and The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Flouting (Not Flaunting) the Rules of English
The teaching of grammar should be at the heart of the school syllabus. Without it we are killing intellectual curiosity
Majority rule; minority rights
It is folly to treat UK race relations as totally divorced from the rest of human experience. We need to look at the larger global picture
American revolutions: Rewriting the language of the unheard
‘Dissenting viewpoints — for example, the belief that America is not an intrinsically racist country—are shunned as further proof of racist pathologies’
The favourites
From Piers Gaveston onwards, controversial courtiers have a long history in British politics.How unusual is Dominic Cummings?