Quotations I read or remembered recently

"HG Wells had a mind like a limitless ocean, six inches deep."

Rebecca West 

"The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet." 

Damon Runyon

"It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people."

Logan Pearsall Smith

"The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything." 

Is America a nation founded on a creed or on British stock and culture?

G.K. Chesterton said in 1921

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. 

The US's House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, thinks so. He told interns in Congress this week that

America is the only nation founded on an idea not on an identity.

But is that right? Forty years after the American declaration of independence the South American republics were founded by deists and Freemasons based on the same creed. The

VERY well done, New Zealand!

Only preliminary results are in but it seems New Zealand voted to keep their old flag - with the Union Jack in the corner. Britishness is the kernel of New Zealand, Australia, Canada and, more distantly, of the USA. More important even than that, history is vital to every nation. History gives one a footing in the universe. The alternative is a soup of individuals possibly linked by things called values.

I wrote here about how nations should not be made of values but of blood and history.

My old friend the historian Andrew Roberts also rejoices at New Zealand's decision.

If only instead of belonging to the European union Great Britain belonged to a similar body composed of Canada, New Zealand and Australia as Joseph Chamberlain far sightedly dreamt of. Rhodesia and South Africa though would have presented problems. 

If the Queen wants to leave the EU does that settle the question?

Does H.M. the Queen want to leave the EU? If she does, does that settle the question of how to vote or would that be being too loyal to the throne?

According to a story in the Sun headlined "Queen backs Brexit" she does and the editor of the Sun, Tony Gallagher, said on Radio 4 

"We knew much more than we published".

But in fact the Sun's story, true or not, dates from 2011 and 'Brexit', Britain leaving the EU, was not mentioned.  So, however much the Sun protests, things are not clear.

I was told last year that the Duke of Edinburgh is strongly for Brexit but the

Neagu Djuvara tells me Europe is committing suicide

"Europe is committing suicide. Langsam aber sicher. Slowly but surely."

Is there nothing we can do to avoid this, I ask.

"There is no escape. It is our destiny."

I am taking tea with Neagu Djuvaru, the doyen of Romanian historians, who will be 100 in August. He is an old man but has the ebullience of a child, except when he thinks about the future of Europe, which he is glad he will not live to see. There is, he says firmly, no alternative to a Muslim conquest of Europe and the end of Western civilization. 

One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.

One does odd things. You see, when one's young one doesn't feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things because they are not “for good”; one thinks everything is a rehearsal - to be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One

Emigrants as national assets in a borderless world

Professor Neagu Djuvara told me, when I met him last week, that his generation, of whom he is one of the last survivors, went abroad to study and to return, whereas young Romanians today leave Romania and do not want to come back. This he describes as tragic.

He has a very good point. Romania is now an emigrant country. Most Romanian emigrants will not come back though more and more do, including the Prime Minister, Dacian Cioloș, who for years worked abroad as an expert in rural development. But what perhaps Professor Neagu Djuvara does not understand is that emigration means something very different in the age of smartphones and Facebook from what it did when he went to Paris to study in the 1930s.

A couple of days after I met Neagu Djuvara  I was invited to a conference on the Romanian diaspora at the Cotroceni Palace in Bucharest and heard Kinsley Aikens, a world authority on diasporas, talk in a much more cheerful  way about migration. Which is as

Meeting Neagu Djuvaru

'Europe is committing suicide. Langsam aber sicher. Slowly but surely.'

Is there nothing we can do to avoid this, I ask.

'There is no escape. It is our destiny.'

I am taking tea with Neagu Djuvaru, the doyen of Romanian historians, who will be 100 in August. He is an old man but has the ebullience of a child. He seems a very happy man except when he thinks about the future of Europe, which he is glad he will not live to see. 

There is, he says firmly, no alternative to a Muslim conquest of Europe and the end of Western civilisation. It is a thesis he has repeated several times in interviews. Romanians, who have not been exposed to cultural relativism, treat it with great respect.

I tell him that an American history professor recently said to me that Western civilisation will not come to an end because it is now universal.  There is no other civilisation. But as I
say this I realise that there was no alternative to Western civilisation in the fifth century