In case you wondered …

PETER HITCHENS: God forgive me, I was one of the millions of young men who wanted to be Bob Dylan. Here's what the new film DOESN'T tell you | Daily Mail Online (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Truth and faith …

… Errol Morris on Documentary Filmmaking and Christopher Hitchens - Air Mail.

Truth is a quest. An endless procession through a labyrinth of evidence to a deeper understanding of what really is out there in the world. And yet, truth itself is something that we can’t know for certain—except, perhaps, under controlled or limited circumstances.

Hmm …

 … Why Hitch Still Matters: On Christopher Hitchens’s “A Hitch in Time” (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I always enjoyed reading or watching, but I don’t think he new this country as well as he thought he did.

A fresh look …

… (14) Like a windowpane - by Dan Hitchens - The Pineapple. (Har tip, Dave Lull.)

The myth of Orwell’s plain style

Hmm …

…PETER HITCHENS: Are the Left's thought police about to cancel George Orwell? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

This sounds very worrisome …

… My Review from the Daily Mail of Alex South's Impressive Book on Her Years as a Prison Officer. - Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Just so you know …

…Why 'Oppenheimer' is a Bad Film - Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

This is important …

… 

How we gave up on Salman Rushdie - UnHerd.

… the finest words of all, demonstrating how morbid it all was, came from a man dead for 10 years. In the first rounds of the fatwa, Christopher Hitchens had tirelessly stumped for Rushdie. Now, in this latest, unexpected round, Hitchens was summoned from his grave. All weekend, videos of him defending Rushdie were shared, videos where Hitchens spoke with an unimaginable frankness, videos where he spoke with more force, more intelligence, and more authority than anybody alive today.

Have a blessed Pentecost …

…Tomorrow is Whit Sunday. On a day just like today, Philip Larkin was late getting away to take the train, and wrote 'The Whitsun Weddings' - Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Which brings me to my first text for this evening, from the great religious poet, Philip Larkin. Larkin is religious precisely because he very much did not mean to be, but he was. He was of God’s party without knowing it.

 

Poetry, memory, and life …

… Learning by Heart by Dan Hitchens | Articles | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

A poem can console even when it has nothing consoling to say—much as a person can, simply by being there. A few years ago, a Cambridge University research project surveyed hundreds of poetry-lovers on the effects of memorization. The researchers discovered that people who had learned a poem by heart frequently referred to it as though it were alive. One interviewee told the researchers: “A poem is like a person—if I met you next week I wouldn’t expect you to be the same.” Another said the poems he knew had become “like personal friends deeply rooted in my head.”

When I saw my friend Harold Boatrite lying in his coffin I recited to him — yes, that’s how it felt — Gerard Manley  Hopkins’s “Felix Randal.” The lines “This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears. / My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears, / Thy tears that touched my heart …” seemed somehow appropriate.

Wonderful …

… Interview with Peter Hitchens - English Churchman. (Har tip, Dave Lull.)

The closure of all churches during the first state-sponsored strangulation of our society was worse than a crime. It was a mistake. If the leaders of the Church don’t think proper regular public worship, in consecrated buildings, is absolutely necessary, then why should anyone else do so?  The continued closure of many churches, needlessly, in the recent period, underline this. If we truly believe in eternal life, then we should not submit so easily to secular decrees. If we believe in the love of God, we might do well not to fall in so easily with policies based largely upon fear.  I suspect that like other worldly persons, the C o E’;s leaders will eventually use the economic damage from strangulation as a pretext for closing things that ought to stay open.

 Which is why I sent my archbishop a clip of Alan Rickman in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves telling his scribe to cut the rations to the lepers and cancel Christmas. Too bad some of these guys have greater faith in the media and our loathsome political class than they do in God.

Appreciation

… Republished to mark new editions of Olivia Manning's 'Balkan Trilogy' some Thoughts on a Neglected Author - Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Olivia Manning is a greatly underestimated author whose two trilogies (the Balkan and the Levant) were dramatised as ‘The Fortunes of War’ in the late 1980s by the BBC, with Emma Thompson playing Harriet Pringle, the main character, based upon Olivia Manning herself. The three original novels of the Balkan trilogy (normally now sold in a single volume) , with their thought-provoking titles 'The Great Fortune' 'The Spoilt City' and 'Friends and Heroes' have just been republished in the Windmill Books imprint. 

Facing the truth …

… Bookings to Utopia by Peter Hitchens | Articles | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Now you may be in the intelligentsia, and be rude about Stalin, as well as rude about the U.S.A. and the British Empire. Anti-Stalinism has become not just respectable on the left but almost obligatory. Mainstream publishing houses that once would have regarded anti-­Soviet books as close to fascism fall over themselves to publish volumes about how evil Stalin was. The Gulag is admitted to have been really quite bad. Even Western novelists, such as the modish Martin Amis (Koba the Dread and The House of Meetings) and the intelligent thriller-writer Robert ­Harris (Archangel), have joined in. This sort of thing will never rival the vast literary and historical industry devoted to Nazi Germany, but beyond doubt something has changed. One man who deserves a great deal of the credit for this transformation is Vasily Grossman (1905–1964). He has become the left-wing Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a bridge across which former sympathizers of Soviet power have travelled to a renewed and cleansed version of their utopian faith. Leftists hated the conservatism and Christianity of the author of The Gulag Archipelago. They did not want to have their dreams trodden on by such a person. So, they hated what he said, even though it was true, because he was the one saying it. But now, almost all thinking radicals have finally rejected the Soviet experiment, or think they have. The generation of 1968 is convinced that its version of utopianism has no risks.

Here is my review of Martin Amis's Koba the Dread. And here is my review of  House of Meetings.

A sense of outrage …

… PETER HITCHENS: My suspicion is that the wrecking of the economy and the state-sponsored panic of these times has killed more people than Covid ever did - Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

A paper submitted to the Government’s own scientific advisory group, SAGE, estimated that 16,000 people had died up to May 1, thanks to missed medical care following the shutdown of the country. They suggested another 26,000 could die by next March for the same reason.

If these figures are right (and I believe they will be vindicated by hard research), the Government’s flailing panic killed two people for every three who died of coronavirus – and that is assuming the Covid death figures are not inflated.

Believe it or not …

… PETER HITCHENS: Face masks turn us into voiceless submissives - and it’s not science forcing us to wear them, it’s politics - Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Here is a clue. On July 12, Deborah Cohen, the medical correspondent of BBC2’s Newsnight, revealed an astonishing thing. The World Health Organisation (WHO) had reversed its advice on face masks, from ‘don’t wear them’ to ‘do wear them’. But the key fact was that it had not done so because of scientific information – the evidence had not backed the wearing of face coverings – but because of political lobbying.She revealed on Twitter that: ‘We had been told by various sources [that the] WHO committee reviewing the evidence had not backed masks but they recommended them due to political lobbying.’ She said the BBC had then put this to the WHO, which did not deny it. 

In March, the WHO had said: ‘There is currently no evidence that wearing a mask (whether medical or other types) by healthy persons in the wider community setting, including universal community masking, can protect them from infection with respiratory viruses, including Covid-19.’

Unlike the Monkees, I am not a believer.

A fine romance …

… Why I Love Trains | Peter Hitchens | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Why is it that I love, or used to love, trains so much? I thought about this often when I was effectively banned, by the virus, from my normal daily journey between Oxford and London, 63 miles each way. Even now, in bare modern trains systematically stripped of character and romance, there can be a glorious seclusion in a long-distance train that does not stop too much. The soft and distant landscape rolls by, and at any time I can look up and see a familiar hill, church, or stretch of woodland. I can name much of what I see, and have walked over a great deal of it, purposely seeking to know the land better.

I spent the first eight years of my life watching the trains go by across from where we lived in North Philadelphia. Though I turned four the year the war ended,  I can remember the troop trains. And yes, there is something wonderful — or the used to be — about a long train ride.

Strolling among the woke …

… PETER HITCHENS: I've seen hamsters more intimidating than this mob who shouted at me - but what is frightening is their intolerance of all other opinions - Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog.

(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Who doesn’t think black lives matter? Who doesn’t value the NHS? But that is not what these displays mean. They are about particular ways of holding those views, ways which lead relentlessly to intolerance of dissent, to the enforcement – by threats to the livelihoods of dissenters – of a single set of acceptable opinions. 

Crying in the wilderness …

… PETER HITCHENS: We’re destroying the nation’s wealth – and the health of millions - Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Eventually there will be an accounting for this. It ought to be soon, and I hope it will be. But if not, it will be important that protests such as mine were made and heard at the time. Nobody will be able to say, when the much-needed inquiry eventually sits in judgment on these times and on those responsible, that criticism is just hindsight and that nobody pointed out at the time that a grave mistake was being made.

A not-so-fine romance …

… We Love Big Brother | Peter Hitchens | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

FYI …

… Martin Amis to publish novel inspired by death of Christopher Hitchens | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull)