Millennial predictions: cities will wither
Paris. London. New York. Perhaps Tokyo. Never Sao Paolo. Never Mumbai. So sings the liberal cultural…
Forebodings
It is not just the Paris attacks but Lebanon, the Russian plane from Egypt and Paris…
Staying sane and the infinite conversation
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long…
Millennial predictions 3 – big states will continue to fragment
Fernandez-Armesto’s interest as an historian rests in his unusual observations, framed in remarkable prose and made…
The Armenian genocide
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire began to crumble and to…
Some measure of insanity
Let me simply record this statement from Donald Winnicott, which I have taken from the end…
Notes on the death of culture (Mario Vargas Llosa)
Mario Vargas Llosa reviews, in the overture to this work, four influential essays on the traumatic…
Life cycles
Our culture may lie in ruins; our republics may be distressed; our economies blackjacked by rentier…
Wallace Stevens’ mind of winter
Wallace Stevens is a poet for lovers of beauty among ruins. For those of us in…
Millenial predictions: return of totalitarianisms
Fernandez-Armesto’s second prediction was that rival totalitarianisms would return. This prediction was bravely conservative or pessimistic,…