Mulling it Over

Posted on April 4, 2019 by leslie

Chris Mullin, Credit Total Politics

Mulling it Over

Review of Hinterland by Chris Mullin, Profile Books, 2017,
ISBN 978 1 78125 606 0, reviewed by Monty Skew

Some political memoirs are dull. Not so A View from the Foothills, a frank and self-deprecating diary (the first of three) of Chris Mullin’s time in Parliament. Mullin is unusual: a leftwing party loyalist but a fiercely independent MP who worked hard for his constituents. His latest book could have been called From the Sunny Uplands but it is sensibly entitled Hinterland. Continuing in the same vein as the aforementioned diary, he charts his disillusion with the left and with politics generally, content to leave it all behind. This is probably his final set of memoirs and is told with searing honesty and realism.

Mullin describes his childhood and his early years in left wing politics. Vauxhall was once a plum Labour seat. George Strauss ran it like a personal fiefdom. He personally owned the Labour party building and paid the secretary himself. He also restricted the local membership. The shameful role of John Silkin, another lawyer, who controlled a rotten borough in Deptford, is also well told. Silkin spent much of his time fighting the Left. Like many Labour MPs of the time, Strauss and Silkin could have belonged to any party. These were the rotten boroughs dominated by right-wing Labourites and trade unions, often in a corrupt embrace.

This fact was identified by left-wingers who targeted such seats. Reg Prentice in Newham North East was the first to be deselected and he defected to the Conservatives after being staunchly defended by Labour leaders. He then announced that he had always been a Conservative! Both before and during his parliamentary stint, Mullin helped to democratise the Labour party and install reselection of MPs as a positive process. He knew something about this for as soon as he became MP, there were organised attempts to unseat him. Continue reading →

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Presbyterians, Preparing for Battle

Posted on April 2, 2019 by leslie

John Knox

Presbyterians, Preparing for Battle

Jeffrey S. McDonald, John Gerstner and the Renewal of Presbyterian and Reformed Evangelicalism in Modern America, Pickwick, 2017, Pp. 263, reviewed by Darrell Sutton

John Knox (1514-1572), one of the founding fathers of Protestantism, did not eschew controversy. Preaching with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other, he campaigned as if the soul’s stake in heaven depended on his efforts. Some commentators consider him the founder of Presbyterianism. His theological precepts persisted in the creeds of his followers.

Down through the ages, clergymen lamented any dilution of the founders’ convictions. The sword of the Spirit became their weapon of choice. Preach the Bible! – the clergy iterated. For laymen, surely, could not impede the renunciation of faith. Skepticism divorced people from their once firmly held belief in biblical texts.

The majority of adherents to Calvinistic views can no longer can read Luther, Calvin or other non-English writers in their original languages. The Enlightenment helped critical scholarship, but the flow of new information did not lead parishioners back to the textual sources of their faith. The Church drifted into the arms of secularists. One thing is certain though, in these days when the use of secondary literature prevails even in synods where Lutheran and Calvinian beliefs have been staunchly maintained, New Reformers were/are needed. Continue reading →

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TV Tarts: Cringe Factor

Posted on April 1, 2019 by leslie

Robert S. Mueller

TV Tarts: Cringe Factor

By Ilana Mercer

It takes a foreign correspondent planted amid our White House Press Corps to highlight the latter’s dysfunction. During a presser with “Trump of the Tropics”—Brazil’s visiting prime minister, Jair Bolsonaro—a Brazilian lass distinguished herself by focusing exclusively on … hefty matters. When this foreign correspondent asked President Trump about the “OECD,” the furrows on the sloping brows who make up the American press scrum deepened. 

To these presstitutes, it mattered not whether America was going to put in a good word for Brazil at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, when there was one overriding, life-or-death matter to tackle:

Trump’s irredeemable, unrelenting, absolute awfulness, which not even an exoneration by the sainted Mr. Mueller has ameliorated.

Yes, Grand Inquisitor Robert Mueller found no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia in the 2016 election. This has altered not one bit the hyperventilating done by the harridans on the ubiquitous television panels.

Let me be clear. When I allude to the women of TV, I include those with the Y Chromosome. Continue reading →

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Review of Handel’s Berenice

Posted on March 30, 2019 by leslie

Review of Handel’s Berenice 

Linbury Theatre, Covent Garden, 27th March 2019, co-production by Royal Opera and London Handel Festival, directed by Adele Thomas, London Handel Orchestra conducted by Laurence Cummings, libretto translated by Selma Dimitrijevic, reviewed by Leslie Jones

Bragging rights matter. Spur’s new stadium reportedly has the longest bar in Europe, the aptly named “touchline”. But the Linbury Theatre, an intimate space, evidently has the longest sofa. It was the only prop in Royal Opera’s paired down new production of Handel’s Berenice. Commissioned in 1736 and premiered at Covent Garden in the following year, it tanked after only three performances.

Richard Morrison, in an otherwise positive review in the Times, notes “how little of the text is adequately enunciated”, even though the libretto is sung in English. Or to put it in plain English, the words aren’t clear. He was not the only critic to bemoan the absence of surtitles. But ultimately it is the interaction between the libretto and the music that matters in Handel, not the meaning of the words. Wagner’s total art work and opera verismo were yet to come. Continue reading →

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Van Gogh and Britain

Posted on March 28, 2019 by leslie

Van Gogh, Garden of Saint Rémy Asylum

Van Gogh and Britain

Van Gogh and Britain, Tate Britain, 27th March 2019, exhibition curated by Carol Jacobi
Van Gogh and Britain, edited by Carol Jacobi, Tate Publishing, London, 2019, 240 pp

Reviewed by Leslie Jones

From 1873-1876, Van Gogh was a trainee art dealer in London with the Goupil Gallery. He evidently admired numerous British authors, notably Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens and George Eliot but also poets and dramatists such as Keats and Shakespeare. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was for him a “beloved book”. Several of the writers he revered had addressed the seemingly intractable social problems generated by industrial capitalism.

While in London, Van Gogh collected prints, particularly those by Gustave Doré, whose “resolute honesty” he respected. His only painting of London, The Prison Courtyard (1890), which is included in the exhibition is, as he euphemistically put it, a ‘translation’ of Dore’s print Newgate: The Exercise Yard, from London a Pilgrimage (1872). Even the tiny, symbolic detail of two butterflies at the top of the engraving is repeated in the painting (see Van Gogh and Britain, page 95). In similar fashion, the watercolour Woman Sewing and Cat (October-November 1881) is indebted to Doré’s The Song of the Shirt, an illustration of Thomas Hood’s eponymous poem about exploited seamstresses.

In the drawing Sorrow (April 1882), reminiscent of Edvard Munch, we see a naked pregnant woman. The model was the prostitute and sometime seamstress Sien Hoornik, whom Vincent had met at a soup kitchen in the Hague and who subsequently drowned herself. She was also the model for Mourning Woman Seated on a Basket (Feb-March 1883). Van Gogh’s uncanny ability to depict human emotions expressed through body language is also demonstrated by the lithograph At Eternity’s Gate (November 1882) and the subsequent painting Sorrowing Old Man, ‘At Eternity’s Gate’ (May 1890).

Van Gogh, Sorrowing Old Man

Continue reading →

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Harridans Orchestrate Witch Hunts

Posted on March 27, 2019 by leslie

Tucker Carlson

Harridans Orchestrate Witch Hunts,

Ilana Mercer slams #MeToo

The particular CNN segment I was watching concerned Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. It was meant to help terminate the controversial anchor’s career.

The sourpuss, dressed in marigold yellow, who was presiding over the seek-and-destroy mission, targeting the ultra-conservative Mr. Carlson, was none other than Poppy Harlow.

It transpires that years back, Carlson had routinely called into a Howard-Stern-like shock-jock radio show and made provocative comments, some about women. Women were “extremely primitive,” he had quipped.

To watch the countless, indistinguishable, ruthless, atavistic women empaneled on CNN, MSNBC, even Fox News—one cannot but agree as to the nature and caliber of the women privileged and elevated in our democracy, and by mass society, in general.

They’re certainly not women with the intellect and wit of a Margot Asquith—countess of Oxford, author and socialite (1864-1945). Would that women like Mrs. Asquith were permitted to put lesser “ladies” like CNN’s Ms. Harlow in their proper place. Continue reading →

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Who are You?

Posted on March 24, 2019 by leslie

Portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Who are You?

Identity: the Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, Francis Fukuyama, Profile Books, London, 2018, 218 pp., reviewed by Leslie Jones

According to sociologist Francis Fukuyama, identity politics can sometimes be “a natural and inevitable response to injustice”.[i] For notwithstanding the nominal equality of the liberal democracies, people are too often judged by their skin colour, or their gender etc. He therefore endorses the demands of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.

The left invariably supports such protest movements. It has no answer, however, to the job losses caused by automation and globalisation, as manufacturing moves from Europe and the US to regions such as East Asia, with lower labour costs. Indeed, as segments of the working class are “dragged into an underclass”[ii] the American left has all but abandoned its traditional natural constituency, to wit, the proletariat.

Into the resulting political and ideological vacuum stepped candidate Donald Trump, a consummate political operator, highlighting in his campaign both deindustrialisation and the opioid crisis blighting white communities. Fukuyama notes that the left’s support for identity politics, immigration and political correctness is “a major source of mobilisation on the right”[iii], a veritable recruiting sergeant. Trump supporters are generally neither poor nor are they mainly manual workers. But they are “bottom of the white heap”.[iv]  They resent their declining status and the metropolitan elite’s preoccupation with minorities. For his fans, Trump is “like a poor person, just with more money”.[v] They admire his refusal to be politically correct, witness his acerbic comments about “Pocahontas”, aka Senator Elizabeth Warren. Continue reading →

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Brexit – Crunch Time

Posted on March 19, 2019 by leslie

Credit Legal Sports Report

Brexit – Crunch Time

by Stuart Millson

Despite a rash of remain-inspired parliamentary motions, an all-out media assault against our withdrawal from the EU, and the prospect of a postponement of our leave date, the wheels of change are turning – both in Britain and Europe.

Notwithstanding being presented as the event that would finally settle the decades-long argument over Common Market/European Union membership, the British electorate’s historic 2016 vote to discontinue membership of that bloc – a decision subsequently ratified last summer in the form of Parliament’s EU Withdrawal Act – has set in motion a series of convulsions, which, no doubt, will still be rumbling through our national life for years to come.

On that referendum night three years ago, when Derby, Doncaster, Dorset and a thousand other places far away from the pro-EU political elite, broke away from 40 years of Brussels control, one of the great post-war, liberal-consensus, sacred-cows was slaughtered – to the horror of most of our politicians, civil servants, academics and broadcasters. The latter have fought a rearguard-action ever since – a cultural civil war against Brexit, employing tactics, such as: ‘Project Fear’ (ludicrous scare stories about economic disintegration and impending shortages of food and medical supplies); a High Court legal action on whether the Government had the sole authority to invoke the Lisbon Treaty ‘Article 50’ leave mechanism; and the accusation that the pro-Leave side made false claims about the nature of the EU – thus requiring a second referendum (a feature of nearly every BBC news report about Brexit) to bring us back to our senses. Continue reading →

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Kamala’s Values Cudgel

Posted on March 18, 2019 by leslie

Kamala Harris, with a supporter

Kamala’s Values Cudgel

by Ilana Mercer

Sen. Kamala Harris talks a lot about “our American values.” Ditto the other female candidates who’ve declared for president in the busy Democratic field.

“Our American values are under attack,” Harris has tweeted. “Babies are being ripped from their parents at the border …” As to her own proud “know your values moment,” the Democrat from California pinpoints the U.S. Senate Supreme Court confirmation proceedings inflicted on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

To manipulate Americans, politicians always use the values cudgel. With respect to immigration, the idea is to impress upon gullible Americans that the world has a global Right of Return to the U.S. Fail to accept egalitarian immigration for all into America and you are flouting the very essence of Americanism. Or, to use liberal argumentation, you’re Hitler. Continue reading →

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Getting to Know Benno Landsberger

Posted on March 16, 2019 by leslie

Benno Landsberger courtesy sites.google.com

Getting to Know Benno Landsberger

Luděk Vacín, The Unknown Benno Landsberger: ‘A Biographical Sketch of an Assyriological Altmeister’s Development, Exile, and Personal Life’, (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2018), $45.00. Pp.132

Assyriologists in recent times have ruminated on their own discipline. Historical sketches of notable characters, and depictions of the start-up of specialized journals and cuneiform series, have prompted scholars to think long and hard about their roots and origins. The number of articles written on these topics is accumulating. The field is not large. But certain figures do stand out.

Benno Landsberger (1890-1968) was a pioneer of Assyriological studies. He stood atop the field of Sumerian and Akkadian lexicographical researches in his day. Even an encyclopedic scholar like W.F. Albright (1891-1971) described him as “incomparable” (BASOR Apr.1957; p.35). Landsberger (BL) held notable Professorships; his writings are known within a small circle of scholars. A much smaller circle inside that one includes handfuls of erudite men and women who are equipped with the knowledge to penetrate the cuneiform mysteries of Mesopotamian worlds. BL was a student and disciple of Heinrich Zimmern (1862-1931), a distinguished Assyriologist who went his own way in his researches, and whose scholarship BL preferred to the erudition of Friedrich Delitzsch (1850-1922). Continue reading →

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