Kings in the North: The House of Percy in British History
Cambridge Fellow John Adamson reviews a new book on one of England's oldest aristocratic families for The Telegraph. After following William the Conqueror from Normandy, the Percys -- who would become the Earls and Dukes of Northumberland -- participated in several of the more important events of medieval and early modern English history. They also provided a Shakespearean character or two along the way.

New investment for Stonehenge
The commission that operates one of England's most famous cultural landmarks has announced a multi-million pound plan to preserve and restore the site, improve the transportation infrastructure around it, and build a new education center to give visitors a broader view not just of the stones themselves but of the lesser-known processional routes and burial mounds as well.

Brevity is the soul of wit
The Encyclopaedia Britannica returns to print today (after four years of publishing only on CD-ROM) with its first ever one-volume edition.


Speaking of Britannica, I have noticed that, as with the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, someone has put the celebrated 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica online, although not all of the article links appear to work. The 29-volume 11th edition, much sought-after in rare book shops, has, for its entries, scholarly articles by some of the leading authorities of the day.

The horror in Flanders fields
Winston Groom, the author of Forest Gump, has written a non-fiction book about the Great War's battles in Belgium, where over a million men went down to death in conditions almost too wretched to contemplate. It was in Ypres, formerly "a small, quaint medieval city, once the center of Europe's cloth trade, graced by the cathedral of St. Martin and the magnificent Cloth Hall, completed in 1260" that mustard gas and flamethrowers, trenchfoot and shell shock first entered the Western experience.

Blogger glitch
Because of Blogger gremlins, the entry from last night on Europe's memory of the Great War got posted while it was still rough. I have since edited and polished it somewhat. I would link to it directly, but another Blogger gremlin is preventing that from working at the moment.

"Happy families are all alike . . ."
100 members of Count Leo Tolstoy's family, which scattered around the world after the Bolshevik revolution, returned yesterday to their ancestral seat, Yasnaya Polyana, where the Russian author wrote many of his great novels. What is particularly interesting about this story is the way the local villagers, despite both Communism and the transition to liberal democracy, continue to regard the family with manorial deference and respect.

The Old Kingdom Beer
A Japanese brewery has brewed a beer based on a recipe found in 4400-year-old ancient Egyptian wall paintings. It is rather different from what one finds on tap at the local pub.

Fading Away, indeed
A 1999 article in The Atlantic Monthly on the Great War opens with this moving description of the war's continuing immediacy for Europeans:


"AMERICANS scarcely marked the eightieth Armistice Day, this past November 11. But standing with stricken faces before the Cenotaph at Whitehall and the Ossuaire at Verdun, and tolling bells in the gloomy villages of Lancashire and the Pas-de-Calais, the British and the French, our erstwhile co-belligerents, mourned as if freshly wounded. For them the Great War is not yet merely history."


Recent reports, however, would seem to indicate that, even in the nations most devastated by it, the Great War is now gradually becoming just that, "merely history." John Derbyshire, who understands that words mean things, noted a generational break: his contemporaries in England are the first to refer to the conflict by the distanced and less awe-inspiring name "The First World War." Then there was the French plan to build an airport on the site of the Battle of the Somme. Now comes word that Belgium wants to extend a highway across the Ypres Salient, overtop the bones of the dead. International protest caused the French to scuttle the so-called Somme airport, and there is growing dismay, both in Belgium and Britain, over the Ypres road. But that such plans are floated at all reveals the direction of the momentum: deference to an ever more remote past is giving place to the practical concerns of the present. It is likely that similar proposals will grow more common in the years ahead as the power of the memory fades like the echo of the guns. The BBC mentions a movement to have Ypres declared a World Heritage Site. Let us hope it succeeds. Despite the natural passing of time, Ypres, like the Somme, deserves silence and reverential attention, not the roaring noise of engines speeding travelers obliviously by.

The 1936 Berlin Olympics
Yesterday marked the anniversary of the commencement of Hitler's games. On 2nd August, The New York Times ran this disturbing front-page description of the Opening Ceremonies, at which the American delegation acquitted itself honorably. Although German athletes ultimately took the most medals, Jesse Owens ruined the Nazis' intended demonstration of Aryan superiority by winning gold in several Track & Field events.

Hungarian Prime Minister defends his covert past


Peter Medgyessy, who led the Socialist Party (the successor to Hungary's Communist Party) to electoral victory a few months ago, is facing a scandal over his work as a counter-espionage agent in the Communist-era secret service. According to the BBC, he "said he had simply done his job and denied writing incriminating reports about individuals." He subsequently served as finance minister in the last Communist administration.


On a related note, see John O'Sullivan's good column from last April on Right & Left, and Fascism & Communism, in the Hungarian election.

"Dr Livingstone, I presume"
A wonderful array of possessions relating to the Victorian adventurer Sir Henry Morton Stanley's African expeditions will soon go up for auction in London. Among the items are a rifle, annotated maps, photographs, native dresses, spears, and war axes. Stanley undertook his best known journey into Africa in 1871 to find British missionary David Livingstone, whom he eventually met near Lake Tanganyika, prompting the famous quotation.

Rychlak on Goldhagen's Pius XII
In the June-July issue of First Things, Professor Ronald Rychlak (author of Hitler, the War, and the Pope) writes a long and meticulously detailed demolition of Daniel Goldhagen's irresponsible and outrageous charges -- even beyond the usual -- against Pope Pius XII, which recently ran in The New Republic. His last section, on The New Republic's obligation to its readers, is especially worth reading, in particular this devastating closing paragraph:


"Why did the New Republic choose to pass off to its readers this fabrication as scholarly history? The only apparent answer is that the editors were so anxious to vilify Catholics, their Church, and Pope Pius XII—so willing to join in Goldhagen’s vicious attacks—that they did not want to learn the truth: Goldhagen’s thesis is based upon selective sources, doctored quotations, sloppy inaccuracies, half–truths, and outright falsehoods. People of good will, regardless of their faith, are right to reject it."

Soviet atrocity unearthed in Ukraine
Visitng monks recently happened upon the remains of a particularly appalling Soviet massacre in the basement of a Ukrainian monastery, which the secret police had occupied after the Second World War. This long Washington Post story on this discovery and the Soviet legacy is excellent. Thanks to LewRockwell.com for the link.

2,500-year-old Greek sculpture stolen
The British Museum's woes continue. In a real-life Thomas Crown Affair, a thief entered the museum last Tuesday and walked out undiscovered with an ancient Greek marble head. One wonders whether the lack of adequate security was due to the institution's budget crisis, which, sad to say, is now even calling into question its ability properly to conserve its signature antiquities, including the Elgin Marbles.

The Great War
In his column today, John Derbyshire wistfully remarks that his is the first generation of Englishmen to call the 1914-1918 war the "First World War" rather than "The Great War." Because of what Oxford historian J.M. Roberts calls the conflict's "unprecedented psychological and cultural effects," I prefer the older title.

Going away for a few days


I am departing presently for a business trip to Our Nation's Capital, which will leave something of a lacuna in this blog until late tomorrow evening or, more likely, Friday morning. I shouldn't wish to leave you empty-handed, however, and therefore offer a couple of parting gifts.


1. Those of a monarchist bent might enjoy exploring the many interesting things to be found on the official web site of the revived Almanach de Gotha.


2. Of a more general interest, I present the essay I mentioned in this post, which makes a cultural argument for rebuilding the Twin Towers essentially as they were before September 11th. I wrote it last year in the weeks following the attacks (with some minor edits since), but it was never published before now.


PS -- If you haven't seen it yet, there is also my post from earlier this morning on the Cunard Line's Queen Mary 2.


Restoring the World Trade Center and the American Spirit
By Matthew Alexander


Larry Silverstein, who holds the lease on the World Trade Center property, has vowed to rebuild the site, but sadly his proposed design of four fifty story office buildings cannot do justice to his noble sentiment. The World Trade Center was not special because it was an office complex but because of what it symbolized. To heal the neighborhood and the country, then, requires not just that the property perform its former function again; it most also revive and embody the same intangible spirit. Mayor Giuliani has promised to make “the skyline whole again,” and for that to happen both physically and psychologically, the Twin Towers themselves must return.


What did the Twin Towers represent? Since September 11th, the common interpretation has been that they were symbols of capitalism and that the terrorists chose to attack them for that reason, but this is all too reductive. The terrorists wanted was to kill many people
visibly and to do so in a symbolically meaningful way; and being Islamic fundamentalists, not Marxists, they were concerned with something larger and less abstract than the capitalist system: America and American culture. It was these for which the Towers stood.


Those Towers, built within living memory of many Americans, were expressions and realizations of American prosperity and potential, spirit and soul, as all cultures' monuments are. They seemed as givens, like any mountain or island. They were our marks upon the landscape and we thought them immovable. Our children learned to revere them as icons, the way those who grew up beneath majestic temples and pyramids must once have done. Breathtaking feats of engineering, imagination, and technological innovation, the Towers soared with grandeur and noble simplicity. Their beauty came from their balance and their symmetry and because they carried the rest of the skyline up to the heights with them. There were aesthetic criticisms of them at first, but in the years that followed, the surrounding area was redeveloped to depend on, reflect, and highlight those Twin Towers. This is in part why the skyline looks so empty and wounded without them. And the extent to which they were misfits has been overstated anyway: if one looked down University Place off Union Square, for example, the Towers stood exquisitely framed at the end. That empty frame is what makes photographs taken from there of the September 11th events so poignant. Then there was the harbor view of the Statue of Liberty lined up between the Towers, drawing the eye upward along the perfect vertical axis.


Looking now across the river at New York now from New Jersey there is nothing at its entrance to define the space, and the Empire State Building, located in midtown, is too small and ill-placed to do the job. The great City, the world's cultural and financial capital, lays low. The sky has collapsed on it without the Towers to push it back. No skyline was more triumphant or more closely associated with its city in the mind of the world than New York’s. The Trade Center defined that skyline, and, as in an army, when the general is killed the soldiers lose their nerve, so it is with New York's other buildings: they no longer assert their order, magnificence, and glory. The
landscape is entirely different and without identity; it cannot be what it was before the Trade Center, because the Trade Center has changed it, and us.


Terrible as the loss of so many lives is, a part of what unsettles so many New Yorkers is the idea that the Towers are no longer there. They should be there, and the mind recoils from contemplating their absence. Seeing that they can vanish in an hour reminds one that, as the ancient Greeks were so anxiously aware, chaos lurks just beyond the fragile boundary of man-made order, an order that, like cast iron, appears unquestionably hard and solid but, when hit with too much force, shatters.


The Towers should be rebuilt because they should still be there. Their destruction at the hands of a few enemies was a deep collective wound to our culture and to our people, and it was an insult. Both must be redressed. We were robbed and are owed restitution. The Trade Center should stand again, and this time with 111 stories as a gesture of defiance and endurance, but also as a memorial of the dead.


Although well intentioned, Mr. Silverstein’s new design would fail symbolically. Four fifty story office buildings, twice as many but half as tall as the giants they would replace, would in their modesty and anonymity represent a negation of nearly everything special about the Trade Center. As they hid themselves among the buildings their predecessors once commanded, they would signal capitulation to fear, the death of ideals, and the futility of aspirations. And whatever plaque or memorial there would be to the dead, the message sent would be that their killers had won the victory by weakening the country’s resolve and changing its life.


A fitting historical role model for New York in its passionate need to rebuild lost monuments is post-war Vienna. When World War II ended, the first thing the Viennese chose to rebuild, and into which they poured all of their resources, was the Vienna State Opera, which
Allied bombs had left in ruins. Like the World Trade Center, the State Opera had met its share of aesthetic criticism. When it first opened in the 19th Century, its design and position in relation to the street were very controversial. Even Emperor Franz Josef voiced his objections, and within months both architects were dead, one by suicide, the other from a stroke, both as a result of the criticism. Yet it was beautiful and symbolic, and the Viennese rebuilt it according to the original plans, a project that lasted until the mid-1950s and met with great acclaim.


By all means wait until after the war is won and our defenses are fortified, but when those are achieved restore the Towers. Businesses will stay in New York; there is still benefit and cache to locating there, despite improvements in technology and globalization. Office space is dear, and as time passes and the terror fades, companies and people will fill brand new Towers, if they are offered to them. New Yorkers, as the mayor has reminded the world, are a proud people. Their monuments should proclaim that anew.

The Queen Mary 2


Cunard, the classic transatlantic steamship line, is building an elegant new flagship, the Queen Mary 2, which will make her debut in 2004. Yesterday, Cunard unveiled an impressive new website devoted to the great lady. Although she will be the largest passenger liner ever built, Cunard is not making the mistake of its onetime rival, White Star, by claiming she will be unsinkable. What the company does promise, though, and would seem to fulfill, is to perpetuate the traditions and standards of the golden age of ocean travel.


After a rather annoying registration page, the Queen Mary 2 site opens with a majestic flash presentation featuring many of the great Cunard liners of the past two centuries (although, conspicuously, not the Lusitania). Following that, one can view a portfolio of artist's renderings of the ship's accomodations and public spaces (including a virtual tour), details of her first voyages, and updates on the progress of her construction.


For those planning marriage, and have the means, I should think that a New York to Southampton voyage on such a liner followed by a rail journey from Paris to Constantinople on the Orient Express would make a splendid honeymoon.

Proofreading Blogs


Father Tucker asks whether he is the only one who appreciates the services of Nihil Obstat, the self-appointed (I assume) editor of Catholic blogs. Well, I certainly do. Although it may not appear so from my posts (which I frequently compose in unbecoming haste), I am as picky as anyone where grammar and usage are concerned.


The weblog medium is a wonderful catalyst for intellectual exchange, as it enables both the quick dissemination of ideas to a wide audience and feedback on them to the author. The downside to it, though, is that it is easy for bloggers to get lazy, because, for most of us, blogging is a way of expressing scattered ideas and insights (albeit united by a common outlook) rather than an outlet for formal writing. (The speed with which one can put up and alter posts also promotes carelessness.) Such sloppy writing can lead to sloppy thinking (and vice versa), which diminishes the worth and effectiveness of the blog. And to the eye of the reader, typos and solecisms are noticeably distracting. (See N.O.'s own comments on this point here.) Nihil Obstat, therefore, does not simply amuse us with pedantry, he also helps ensure (through a little healthy ridicule) that Nothing Stands In The Way of our thoughts being understood.


PS -- I am not Nihil Obstat.

Is the Vinland Map a forgery?
A map in the collections of Yale University, which purports to show that the Vikings landed in North America before Columbus, may be a fraud. A British scientific team claims to have found a chemical in the ink that didn't exist until the 1920s. An American team counters, however, that Carbon-14 tests date the map to 1434.

Rise, Gentlemen! A Lady has entered.
A dear friend, Mrs Lien O'Neill (née Johnson), has begun a blog to offer her traditional Christian perspective on family issues, which she does with wit and style.

Glimmerglass and City Opera


Today's New York Times reviews the highly-regarded Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, New York. As Glimmerglass shares an artistic director with the New York City Opera, the latter regularly stages the former's more interesting productions in Manhattan. This past season, for example, I saw a revival of John Philip Sousa's Glass Blowers, an entertaining romantic comedy set during the Spanish-American War, which had originated in Cooperstown.


On that one occassion, I splurged for better seats than the fourth ring. My companions insisted on it, and rightly so. The Times article calls the New York State Theater, the home of City Opera, "cavernous," but that's not entirely it. The space is also dead, and dead by design. The State Theater was built to house not City Opera but its other resident company, City Ballet, and George Balanchine (the Ballet's great sometime director) instructed that the audience not be able to hear the dancers' steps. Which is great for ballet, but terrible for opera. Consequently, in an acoustic developed to muffle sound, it is difficult to hear the singers (especially in the upper tier) and what one does hear often lacks clarity and crispness. The room is particularly tough on basses, and indeed, in one performance I watched from the fourth ring, it was only a strong soprano who could overcome the handicap completely. (The problem, as I would discover, is less severe the closer one sits to the stage.) Under these conditions, it is little wonder that City Opera is angling for a new theater in the ongoing dispute over the Lincoln Center renovation project.


Of the current Glimmerglass productions likely to come to New York, Poulenc's "Dialogue of the Carmelites" ("'Dialogues' uses the fate of a Carmelite convent during the French Revolution as a way to explore the power of mystical faith in a brutal world," according to the review) sounds especially promising. I had better start saving up for another third ring ticket.

Most of Mostly Mozart Festival Is Canceled by Orchestra Strike
Lincoln Center's summer institution is largely in ruins. The musician's union implacably refused to grant the music director discretionary power to fire orchestra members, and, when Lincoln Center insisted on it, the ad hoc ensemble declared a strike. The few concerts not requiring the Festival Orchestra will continue as scheduled.

Veterans hail 'end of Somme airport'
Good news out of Paris this morning. The French government has scrapped a proposal to build an airport on the site of the Battle of the Somme. Construction would have entailed the dislocation of thousands of war graves from a subsequent battle in 1918, among them those of two American fliers. Australia had expressed concern last March about the airport's threat to the graves of her soldiers buried on that land.


This calls to mind a story related in The Times of London last February that is worth remembering in these times of increasing European disaffection with America. Back in the '60s, French President Charles de Gaulle ordered Lyndon Johnson to withdraw all American troops from French soil. The American President's reply was classic: he had his Secretary of State ask de Gaulle if the demand extended to those lying beneath French soil as well.

Stuttaford on Amis's Stalin


Andrew Stuttaford, whom I have previously called one of National Review's best writers, has written a mixed, nuanced, and brilliant review of Martin Amis's Stalin book. Mr Stuttaford has said before, says here, and ought to continue saying: "There has never been a Soviet Nuremberg." For men concerned with the value of truth and human life, this -- or variations on it, e.g., "Will there ever be a Soviet Nuremberg?" -- ought to become a mantra, a 21C "Carthago delenda est." Beyond its enumeration of the particular flaws and merits of the Amis book, read the piece for its consideration of the old Hitler-Stalin controversy ("a red herring. Any moral distinction between these two bestial systems is so slight as to be irrelevant, and yet our response to them is strikingly different. . . .") and its salutary reminder that utopianism and violence are inextricably linked.


As Mr Stuttaford rightly says, "In forgetting those who were murdered, it is as if we kill them again, and yet with Stalin's dead that it is just what the world seems content to do."

William Crawford's new blog
My friend William Crawford has added a new weblog to his personal homepage, where he hopes to broaden his coverage beyond just technical computer matters. He is an accomplished fellow with a range of interests and fields of expertise, and I recommend you drop in on him from time to time.

Choir continues with concert tour after crash
Fifteen choristers of the St Woolos Cathedral Choir of Newport, Wales and their bus driver were mildly injured yesterday when their bus collided with a tram in Belgium. While four choirboys remain in the hospital, their discharge is expected soon, and the choir intends to conclude its tour with concerts in Bruges and Ghent over the next two days.

Monastery listed as world masterpiece reopens to public


The Monastery of St Francis, a former Franciscan friary in Manchester, England and a splendid example of 19C Neo-Gothic architecture, is now receiving visitors again after a decade of decay and abandonment. Although no longer a religious house, it will at least be preserved as a heritage site. Here is how London's Independent describes its present condition:


"The building is still majestic, despite missing statues and 19th century wall paintings, scrubbed away by volunteers who thought the building needed a good clean. The high altar is one of the highest in England, and despite fire damage, a sanctuary, side chapels and aisles, divided by six arches, are also well preserved."


The foundation that purchased the building is seeking £3 million to finance its restoration.

Ogden Nash
The centennial of the clever verse writer's birth approaches next month, and, by way of a tribute, his old magazine, The New Yorker, re-publishes some of his wittier efforts in its current issue. Each is delightfully cultured, but without the slightest trace of pretentiousness. (Indeed, his goal often was to skewer pretentiousness.) Unfortunately, that section of the magazine is not online, but do turn to it if you have access to the print edition. One short example I shall transcribe here:


Epitaph for an Explorer
Tiger! Tiger! my mistake;
I thought that you were William Blake.
--November 20, 1948

Newspapers Old and New, and their typefaces
Both Ad Orientem and The Corner have spread the good word that The New York Sun, New York's new conservative broadsheet, now has a website. Mr Sullivan even favors us with a link to an analysis of the relationship between The Sun's choice of typefaces and its mission to be an old-fashioned city paper. On a related note, you might enjoy this short history of everyone's standard word processor font, Times New Roman, on the website of its creator, The Times of London.

Hitler diaries agent was a Stasi spy
It has transpired that the man who helped perpetrate a "Hitler diaries" fraud on the Western press in the 1980s was at the time working for the Stasi, the East German secret police.

Locals fear desecration of Sylvia Plath's grave
The residents of the English town where poet Sylvia Plath is buried worry that a new film about her might prompt vandalism of her grave. In the past, feminists have scratched her married name "Hughes" off her tombstone, because they blame her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, for her suicide.

Clinton attacks Bush on the Middle East
Oh this is rich, especially since, as this Stratfor analysis from October 2000 contends, it is arguable that Clinton's quest for a positive legacy is what caused the present two-year-old Palestinian intifada. The Bush administration had a point when it suggested this.

The Failure of American Education
A very disturbing story here. Because its young visitors now know so little about George Washington, Mount Vernon is being forced to dumb down. It should not surprise that political correctness is the principal cause of this ignorance.

Place this in the burgeoning file marked "Evidence in favor of Homeschooling."

Ike's military career
Timothy Naftali reviews a new book on this subject for The New York Times.

Another virtue of the Archbishop-designate of Canterbury
He is pro-life.

Austria Formally Declares War on Servia;
Russia Threatens, Already Moving Troops;
Peace of Europe Now In Kaiser's Hands
--New York Times headline, 29 July 1914


On 28 July 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia with the goal of finally ending the persistent threat posed by a hostile southern neighbor desirous of strengthening herself through the disintegration of the Empire. Exactly one month before, a Bosnian Serb terrorist had assassinated the Hapsburg heir with the suspected complicity of the Serbian authorities. (History would subsequently confirm those suspicions.) Thanks to Germany, this limited war -- a Third Balkan War in as many years -- would within days engulf the Continent. The Great War had begun.

German grave to unlock 'mystery of the Bourbons'


Was the identity of Louis XVI's and Marie Antoinette's eldest daughter -- Marie-Therese Charlotte, the Madame Royale -- secretly switched with that of another girl during the Revolution? Did the real Madame Royale later live out her remaining days undercover in the east German town of Hildburghausen? We may soon know the answers to these questions, as scholars are preparing to compare DNA taken from the grave of the "Dark Countess" (as the townsfolk called the mysterious lady) with a sample taken from Marie Antoinette's hair.

They're Alive!

Thanks be to God, after three harrowing days trapped beneath the earth, all nine Pennsylvania miners have been rescued.


Te Deum laudamus: te Dominum confitemur.
Te, aeternum Patrem, omnis terra veneratur.
Tibi omnes Angeli, tibi caeli et universae Potestates,
Tibi Cherubim et Seraphim incessabili voce proclamant:
Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth.
Pleni sunt caeli et terra maiestatis gloriae tuae.
Te gloriosus Apostolorum chorus;
Te Prophetarum laudabilis numerus;
Te Martyrum candidatus laudat exercitus.
Te per orbem terrarum sancta confitetur Ecclesia:
Patrem immensae maiestatis,
Venerandum tuum verum et unicum Filium,
Sanctum quoque Paraclitum Spiritum.
Tu rex gloriae, Christe,
Tu Patris sempiternus es Filius.
Tu ad liberandum suscepturus hominem non horruisti virginis uterum.
Tu devicto mortis aculeo aperuisti credentibus regna caelorum.
Tu ad dexteram Dei sedes, in gloria Patris.
Iudex crederis esse venturus.
Te ergo quaesumus, tuis famulis subveni, quos pretioso sanguine redemisti!
Aeterna fac cum Sanctis tuis in gloria numerari!
Salvum fac populum tuum, Domine, et benedic hereditati tuae!
Et rege eos, et extolle illos usque in aeternum!
Per singulos dies benedicimus te
Et laudamus nomen tuum in saeculum et in saeculum saeculi.
Dignare, Domine, die isto sine peccato nos custodire!
Miserere nostri, Domine, miserere nostri!
Fiat misericordia tua, Domine, super nos, quemadmodum speravimus in te!
In te, Domine, speravi: non confundar in aeternum. Amen.