Wednesday, 30 April 2025

Quotations

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." Jonathan Swift

"I was recently informed by someone close to the subject that about half of all post-graduate science students at British universities are now Chinese. This is not necessarily a bad thing

Tuesday, 29 April 2025

Saint Anselm's Roman Catholic Church, Pembury, Kent published this on Facebook



The mainstream media is often poor these days. It is found peddling narratives (to skew our vision) over carefully researched fact. Just look at the reporting of Francis death. Then look at these photos.




 
Media narrative: ever so ‘umble Pope Francis moved out of sumptuous old fashioned Vatican apartments to have a simple bedroom.
Truth: it was costly and difficult for the Vatican to accommodate his maverick call to live in a hotel. Meanwhile the rooms were barely different:

Monday, 28 April 2025

Hilaire Belloc never lets you down

"The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine, but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight."

Sunday, 27 April 2025

Pope Francis

"That was a tough 12 years, not gonna lie."
Fred Simon

Francis asked a boy praying with his hands together “Are your hands bound together?” After he left, the boy went back to praying as before. 

“The first 10 years of Pope Francis's pontificate are one of the darkest chapters in the history of the post-Reformation Catholic Church.” Damian Thompsonformer editor of the Catholic Herald, March 13, 2023

Pope Francis changed everything, even if he changed very little

'There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable.'


Lord Macaulay's words are the best thing that wonderful writer even penned. His Protestant Whig soul was inspired.

But John Kenneth Galbraith told Gary Wills in 1972 "Of all the changes I have seen in my lifetime , the greatest by far is the one in your church .” Growing up after the Second Vatican Council the Catholic Church (in England) did not feel old at all. It felt a creation of the early 1960s.

And this had a huge impact on the world in every way, far beyond religion. For many centuries, perhaps since the Roman Empire, the Church represented the pole of conservatism and tradition. Suddenly it became innovative, liberal, democratic and radical. This more than anything else launched the 1960s cultural revolution which has led to feminism, political correctness, woke, the world we inhabit.

Pope Francis, even though he cunningly played with the liberals, gave the impression he was remodelling the Church again like a one man Third Vatican Council. This has had a vast effect.

Saturday, 26 April 2025

Only the Catholic Church....

 


Mr. Ashenden resigned as Chaplain to the late Queen and became a Catholic after a Muslim was invited to recite from the Koran that Jesus is not the Son of God in Glasgow's Episcopal Cathedral. He now writes for the Catholic Herald.  

A simple fact

'Jesus didn’t write a book. He founded a Church.

'The Bible came from the Church, not the other way around.

'To accept Scripture and reject the Church is to forget who preserved, discerned, and canonised the Word.-

Patrick Coffin


How many very tedious and uninformed discussions would be avoided if everyone accepted this obvious historical fact. Educated Protestants do.

Journalist Gideon Levy is the noblest Israeli

Two very admirable things Pope Francis did were to call for peace in Ukraine and Gaza.

Saying Russia was not entirely to blame for the Ukrainian war and calling the Israeli actions genocide were very unpopular in the Western media, unlike most things he said which non-Catholic journalists loved. 

He called up the people in a Catholic church in the Gaza strip each day. 

Thinking about his outspoken condemnation of Israel I feel like quoting Gideon Levy quoting Daniel Blatmann, in an article in the English edition of Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz three days ago.)

Francis glowered a lot



A number of people have praised Pope Francis's smiling face. This surprised me. I remember him scowling a lot. Some people said they disliked the look of him when he first walked out on the balcony after his election. I too had a had feeling about him then. Blogger Steve Skopje who has since lost faith wrote recently:

"When I decided to start my little revolutionary publication, OnePeterFive, it stemmed from the strong, inexplicable sense I had, when I first laid eyes on Bergoglio as he emerged as Pope Francis, that there was something deeply evil at work. It was a powerful, preternatural experience, one I later learned was shared by a number of people around the world — enough to make it more than a coincidence. Too few to be sure what it meant."

He was an angry man who on one occasion slapped a member of the public. He swore a lot too, but he also prayed for hours a day and had a great devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

He is about to be buried in one of my favourite churches where others popes are buried including a much greater man, Pope St. Pius V who created the coaltion which led to the defeat of the Mahometan fleet at Lepanto which saved Christendom. Francis told us that Christendom no longer exists.



He said that the Church should not add burdens to people but burdened Catholics by telling them to share his views on climate change, economics, immigration and capital punishment on top of all the almost innumerable other doctrines we have to believe. In fact the Pope is not infallible on climatology or politics but Catholics do not realise that they are not bound to assent to all his thoughts.

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it: a beautiful funeral for a miserable sinner



Why is Biden who favours partial birth abortion and gender reassignment at the late Pope's funeral? 

Why wasn't he excommunicated, come to that? I believe Pope Benedict XVI ordered this but Cardinal McCarrick, as he then was, didn't pass on the order.

Thursday, 24 April 2025

Editorial in Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz this morning is headlined: 'Don't Look Away: Israel's Annexation of the West Bank Is Already Here'



From the editorial:

At a time when the Israeli right has adopted the "Trump vision" of transferring two million Gazans for the sake of creating an American Riviera and the Israel Defense Forces is preparing the ground there for a supposedly temporary extended stay on which the infrastructure of renewed settlement is being established, annexation of the West Bank is no longer moving at a snail's pace. It has risen to its feet and is proceeding apace.

The annexation is already here. By the time it is formally declared, it will already be too late to stop it – the process will have been completed.

That is the modus operandi of the settlers and the government – to do everything short of a formal declaration, knowing that no one is paying attention and that no one really cares.


From inside pages:


Sources in Washington say that the White House is not pressuring Netanyahu to end the war – in part because it does not want to jeopardize his coalition.




Einav Zangauker, mother of hostage Matan, said she was told by "senior officials" that Netanyahu is trying to secure a partial deal that would mean her son remaining in captivity as "personal revenge" for her criticism of the PM.

Quotations




Sexual desire, when reciprocal, gives life to a conspiracy of two people against the rest of the conspiracies going on in the universe.
It's a conspiracy of two.
The plan is to offer the other a chance to breathe amidst the pain in the world.
John Berger, "My beautiful"
(Translated Milton Fernandez)


Describing Israel’s military campaign in November 2023, Pope Francis said, “this is not war, this is terrorism”, which led the editor of the Jerusalem Post to accuse him of “unconditional support for Hamas”.


"Every time anyone says that Israel is our only friend in the Middle East, I can't help but think that, before Israel, we had no enemies in the Middle East." Father John Sheehan an American Jesuit, June 5 2002

“Rivers do not drink their own water; trees do not eat their own fruit; the sun does not shine on itself and flowers do not spread their fragrance for themselves. Living for others is a rule of nature. We are all born to help each other. No matter how difficult it is…life is good when you are happy; but much better when others are happy because of you.” The Upanishads. Misattributed to Pope Francis.

Tuesday, 22 April 2025

The new British Foreign Secretary

 



David Lammy is now British Foreign Secretary but no cleverer, despite studying at Harvard Law School. When he was on the BBC's quiz programme 'Celebrity Mastermind' he said Marie Antoinette won the Nobel Prize for physics, Henry VII became king when Henry VIII died and Red Leicester is the blue cheese that accompanies port. It is the Henry VII answer that disturbs me most.

Previous Foreign Secretaries included Castlereagh, Canning, Salisbury, Curzon .....

Monday, 21 April 2025

The legacy of Pope Francis

I was told by a well-known English priest long ago not to let Francis rent space in my head and I prefer to think about Benedict XVI.

For a long time I ignored papal news, but it became impossible.

I remember the deal with the Chinese Communists allowing them to appoint bishops, the arrest of Cardinal Zen by the Chinese Communists and the silence with which the Vatican greeted the news, the protection of a series of priestly sex criminals and embezzlers.

The suppression of the Tridentine Mass broke Benedict XVI's heart and those of many other people. 

It was cruel. Pope Francis was, by all accounts, ruthless and, I suspect, sometimes vindictive.

His personal austerity was fine but I wish it had been a private thing. As Archbishop of Buenos Aires he travelled by bus, often with a journalist present. 

The papal apartments that he did not use needed to be cleaned and kept in order, while he took the room at a hostel where another priest could have lived.

At a time when Europe was being invaded by infidel economic migrants he urged governments to accept more, though in practice almost all who got here were allowed to stay. Pope St Pius V who organised the Catholic alliance which defeated the Turk at Lepanto was made of different stuff

Former Archbishop Vigano, whom Francis excommunicated, says he told Francis about McCarrick's crimes to no result. He said today, "His soul has not disappeared. He will have to account for the crimes he has committed." "Crimes" may be harsh and Vigano is a bit crazy now but, as Francis memorably said, who am I to judge?

Not all priests or popes, unfortunately, have been especially nice men. May God have mercy on Francis's soul.

The Pope has died

I prayed yesterday for the Pope's abdication and a good successor. Now we learn of his death.

I am certainly not happy he has died, but certainly not sad. 

The best Pope in many centuries was followed by the least gifted.

Pope Francis died two weeks after former Cardinal Theodore "Uncle Ted" McCarrick who was credibly accused of sexual offences going back to the 1980s. 

Pope Francis was his protégé and that of the group of cardinals who called themselves 'the St Galen Mafia'. They got Francis elected. Francis then cancelled the restrictions that Pope Benedict XVI had placed on McCarrick. 


In a talk at Villanova University in Philadelphia six months after Pope Francis's election, Mr McCarrick said:


“Before the Conclave, nobody thought that there was a chance for Bergoglio”


"A very interesting and influential Italian gentleman” [asked me], ‘What about Bergoglio?’


"And I was surprised at the question.


"I said, ‘What about him?’


"He said, ‘Does he have a chance?’


"I said, ‘I don't think so, because no one has mentioned his name. He hasn't been in anyone's mind. I don't think it’s on anybody's mind to vote for him.”


"He said, ‘He could do it, you know.’


"I said, ‘What could he do?’


"He said, ‘He could reform the Church. If we gave him five years, he could put us back on target.’


"I said, ‘But, he’s 76.’


"He said, ‘Yeah, five years. If we had five years, the Lord working through Bergoglio in five years could make the Church over again.’


"I said, ‘That’s an interesting thing.’


"He said, ‘I know you’re his friend.’


"I said, ‘I hope I am.’


"He said, ‘Talk him up.’


"I said, ‘Well, we'll see what happens. This is God’s work.’


"That was the first that I heard that there were people who thought Bergoglio would be a possibility in this election."


Mr. McCarrick continued: 


“[Francis] has an understanding of human nature, an understanding that, though he says some things that maybe would surprise us, but the interesting thing is that if you examine what he is saying, it is what the Church has said all the time. Maybe not what the canonists have said all the time, or what different theologians have said all the time. But the teaching of the Church all the time is the teaching of Pope Francis.”


And:


“If he has two years, he will have changed the papacy. The longer he is in, the more I think it is likely that we could say that he has changed the papacy".



Sunday, 20 April 2025

Quotations

"If you're going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you're going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic." 

Muriel Spark, a Jewish convert to Catholicism

For if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time."

Thomas De Quincey, "A Second Paper on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" (1839)


"He died in exile: as with all men, it was his lot to live in bad times." 

Jorge Luis Borges 

Oriental wisdom

British parliamentary procedure, insurance systems, steam power, and public education were all described in considerable detail in Chinese texts of the 1830s. Yet despite this, major misconceptions endured. Many still believed British land warfare capabilities were weak, and that tea embargoes would collapse the British economy. Yan Sizong declared: Once the barbarians fail to obtain tea and rhubarb, they will fall into illness… Their whole nation can hardly survive.
Britain through Chinese Eyes: Anglo-Chinese Relations before the First Opium War Sebastian Yang

Christ is risen!


The Resurrection of Christ, Piero della Francesca

The Jesus Seminar, a group of liberal, publicity hungry New Testament scholars who were very fashionable in the USA around the turn of the century, disbelieved most of the Gospels, thought Jesus never claimed to be the Son of God and his corpse was probably thrown into a shallow dirt grave, where it rotted away or was eaten by wild dogs. 


In fact few non-Christian historians doubt the crucifixion happened (the contemporary Jewish historian Josephus records it) and that something happened very shortly afterwards to create a movement which swept the civilised world. 


The non-Christian New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann said ‘It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.’ 

The Resurrection, Sir Edward Burne-Jones (All Hallows Church, Allerton)

These experiences were also enough to lead Peter and Paul to suffer death rather than renounce their faith that Jesus had risen from the tomb and was the Son of God. Their martyrdom under Nero is not questioned by any historian, as far as I ever heard. Peter is said to have been crucified upside down at his request because he did not believe himself worthy of the same death as Jesus, but this seems to be a legend.


The resurrection is the most significant thing in the history of not only the West but the world, whether or not you believe it happened.


Talleyrand met a young man at a party who asked him for his advice about how to start a new religion. The renegade bishop turned pagan replied, 'First die and on the third day come again'. 

Saturday, 19 April 2025

Mark Liberman gives advice on begging the question, an expression almost always used 'wrongly'

Should we join the herd and use "beg the question" to mean "raise the question"? Or should we join the few, proud hold-outs who still use it in the old "assume the conclusion" sense, while complaining about the ignorant rabble who etc.?

In my opinion, those are both bad choices. If you use the phrase to mean "raise the question", some pedants will silently dismiss you as a dunce, while others will complain loudly, thus distracting everyone else from whatever you wanted to say. If you complain about others' "misuse", you come across as an annoying pedant. And if you use the phrase to mean "assume the conclusion", almost no one will understand you.

My recommendation: Never use the phrase yourself — use "assume the conclusion" or "raise the question", depending on what you mean — and cultivate an attitude of serene detachment in the face of its use by others.

Mr Liberman's full note on this point is here

I read it two or three times over the years when, as just happened, somebody 'misuses' the phrase, to remind myself what the row is about. That might mean I am a pedant, which I am, but one who dislikes the sort of (false) pedantry that objects to, for example, England being used when United Kingdom is meant or 'his' to mean 'his or her'.

Serene detachment is a good policy when it comes to grammatical errors and towards people who hold political views you strongly dislike.

I am not setene, however, about using decimate to mean reduce to one tenth (it means reduce by one tenth). I dislike split infinitives and very, very much dislike 'presently' used to mean 'at present'. 

Yet these solecisms also have a very long pedigree. 

I suppose I need to be Zen.

One thing I shall not be serene about. Conduit has two syllables and rhymes with pundit.


  

Friday, 18 April 2025

Marco Rubio: Trump is ready to walk away from Ukraine-Russia peace deal efforts within days if progress isn't made because he has 'other priorities'

On March 11, Mr Rubio said that if Russia did not accept a ceasefire “then we’ll know unfortunately what is the impediment to peace here”. 

Russia has not accepted a ceasefire, shows no signs of doing so soon and killed many Uktainian civilians going to church last Sunday, which was Palm Sunday. 

Mr Rubio has not drawn a conclusion and Mr Trump says the Russian attack was 'a mistake', which possibly it was.

What rankles is that the partial ceasefire suggested by Mr Putin, preventing attacks on power stations, helped Russia and hindered Ukraine, yet Ukraine, doubtless at Mr Trump's request, accepted it.

Mr. Trump in his 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal said: 'It never pays to be in too much of a hurry'. Yet he is in much too much of an obvious hurry is in his dealings with Russia. Russians approach negotiations very slowly.

From April 2017: Why should Great Britain or America fight for the Sunnis?

 Obviously, the USA and UK should never have invaded Iraq. They should have launched a short punitive expedition into Afghanistan in 2001, restored the monarchy and then allowed the Taliban to come back. Nation-building was always (a liberal) folly: Afghanistan and Iraq were not post-war Germany, as should have been clear.


But having broken it, as Colin Powell warned, the USA bought Iraq. Leaving it alone led to ISIS. So what is the solution?

I don't know. Unfortunately, the USA may now back the Israeli-Saudi-Sunni alliance against the Shia crescent (Iran, Syria, Hezbollah). I hope Mr. Trump resists this temptation.

Almost all the terrorist atrocities against Western Europe and the USA are committed by Sunnis, yet we are constantly told that Iran, which is fighting ISIS and Al Qaeda, is the great threat. Why? 

Monday, 14 April 2025

A. J.P. Taylor was an aphorist comparable to George Bernard Shaw

"He [Bismarck] only considered the interests of his own country - always the worst offense that a statesman can commit in the eyes of foreigners."

["On the other hand, she [Signora Meloni] must avoid giving any impression that she is acting solely in Italy’s interests rather than for the EU as a whole." Daily Telegraph today.]

"Once men imagine a danger they soon turn it into a reality."

Quotations

"I am.” 

G.K. Chesterton's two word essay answering the question, “What’s wrong with the world?” 

"In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man."

Saturday, 12 April 2025

From a wonderfully fizzing article by philosopher John Gray that attacks everyone.

 "In Europe, including Britain, the chief beneficiaries of the eclipse of humanism are Islamism and ethnic nationalism. Woke is not a sustainable successor ideology. Hyper-liberalism is still deeply embedded in our ruling institutions; but for most of its followers it is a career strategy, and the institutions – universities, quangos and the like – are unlikely to survive coming fiscal crises intact. Suppressed in the Gulf States and other Muslim-majority countries, radical Islamist movements spell the end of the British experiment in multiculturalism and French republican laïcité. Just as globalisation was supposed to spread “democratic capitalism”, mass immigration was meant to result in conversion to liberal values. The opposite is happening. In a generation or so, if current trends persist, an Ottoman-style millet system – in which different religious communities are governed by their own laws – may coexist uneasily with nationalist governments. A Europe of equal freedom for every religion, under a rule of law that applied to all, would soon be a distant memory."

The future of Europe, Neagu Djuvara and Bernard Lewis said, is to be Muslim, part of the Maghreb. Not Russian or Chinese as Gray thinks is possible. 

De Gaulle, quoted today by Arnaud Bertrand

"No nation worthy of the name has friends—only interests." 

It reminds me of Bismarck's remark:

"The nation that copies another is lost."

My old China

"Because if you starve a blast furnace, there is no easy way to start it up again. Such things cost tens of millions of pounds. Quite why Jingye was planning this remains a mystery. The company never seems to talk to the media. It hasn’t explained its rationale. The most plausible theory is that it plans to relocate most of the operations in Scunthorpe to existing mills (and new ones) in China. Another more outlandish theory, not entirely dismissed by officials in Whitehall, is that it could be acting under orders from Beijing, who would welcome the demise of another leg of British industry. For the time being, though, no-one really knows." 

Quotations

 "The notion that democratic countries are peace loving because they enjoy strong support from populations whereas autocratic, authoritarian countries are necessarily warlike.... because they are fragile, do not enjoy support of the populations and so they tend to look for foreign wars to maintain their hold over the population. That's a very simple notion. Dead wrong of course but try to find people in the European political classes who would disagree with that. This is the whole European values story.... To bring them back to common sense is a vast, vast task." Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, talking to Glenn Diesen







From the blog of John Helmer, Australian correspondent in Moscow since the Soviet era

Several hours after Witkoff had left meeting with Putin, Trump implied that he is blaming the Russians for the failure of the talks so far, and is planning a new ultimatum. “Russia has to get moving”, Trump tweeted.  

Source: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114319592702753512 

A well-informed source in Moscow says that Trump and his subordinates have been surprised by the Russian terms for ending the war. “The Russians have told Americans they will have Odessa and a land corridor to Moldova. They have offered ports on Dnieper River for access to the sea for the Ukrainians. There has been no demand about Nord Stream. Money is being discussed on the sidelines but not in the main talks. In the main room [in Riyadh on February 18] Lavrov and Ushakov brought no papers and asked Americans [Rubio and Waltz] to dust off the December 2021 treaty draft. The Russian positions shocked the Americans. They were told the Ukraine will be demilitarized and its forces will be turned into paramilitary and police. The Americans were also surprised how little Russians cared about Zelensky or his British and Europeans backers. The Americans were told there will be no Ukrainian paramilitary force east of the Dnieper – only police. A new Russian demand was tabled for autonomy of eight Ukrainian oblasts, with Kiev army forces removed. In general, the Russians propose turning the Ukraine into a genuinely federal structure with provisions that Banderites can never take power in Kiev and that the central forces will be limited in their capabilities, supplementing the police if and when Banderites take to the streets. The main purpose of any such force will be de-nazification and keeping it that way. There are demands also about the Orthodox Church in Ukraine.”

If they want Odessa the Russians must first capture it, obviously. I hope to God they don't. 

Friday, 11 April 2025

The war in Gaza 'serves mainly political and personal interests, not security interests'

Nearly 1,000 current and retired members of the Israel Air Force Reserve published a letter yesterday calling for the return of all hostages and an end to the fighting in Gaza.

They wrote: "Currently, the war serves mainly political and personal interests, not security interests. The continuation of the war does not contribute to any of its declared goals and will lead to the deaths of the hostages, Israeli soldiers and innocent civilians, and to the attrition of the IDF reserve forces."

Unfortunately newspaper readers in Europe are often unaware that this fighting has never been about destroying Hamas, something which is impossible and which Netanyahu is not even trying to achieve. Yet it was common sense from the start.

The IDF Chief of Staff said that most of the signatories were not in the active reserve list but those that were would be dismissed if they did not retract. 25 signatories did so.

Netanyahu blames the letter on foreigners. I wonder whom he has in mind. Soros? Could be but probably it's a spontaneous plea for common sense and humanity.

Tuesday, 8 April 2025

Quotations


Oliver Cromwell the Timelord

My readers will be pleased to know that one of the grandsons of John Tyler (10th U.S. President, 1841–45) is still alive, although his brother died a few years ago.

Here is an excerpt from an article Simon Jenkins wrote at the turn of the millennium headlined “Oliver the Timelord (An extraordinary memory reminds us of the ambiguities of time)".

A man of my acquaintance was addressed, when a child, on the subject of Oliver Cromwell. The speaker was a lady of 91. She told him sternly never to speak ill of the great man. She went on: "My husband's first wife's first husband knew Oliver Cromwell - and liked him well." It was an admonition my friend has not forgotten.

Monday, 7 April 2025

Quotations

'One of the many insane things about modern day America:
Tell me what someone thinks of vaccines - and I'll tell you with 95% predictive accuracy what he thinks of the war in Ukraine...'

Eric Krause today

John Mortimer said he was unusual in supporting hunting foxes and abortion but come to think of it why should people who think killing unborn babies is permissible think killing foxes should not be?

I am 5 or 6 removes from King Charles II

After writing that I am four removes from Napoleon (that don't impress me much) I did a few moments more research. 

I met Harold Macmillan, who links me to lots of people, including Thomas Hardy who knew and corresponded with Frederic Harrison. 

Probably there were a myriad other links between Macmillan and Harrison, but as Harrison's books were published by the family publishing firm Macmillan & Co I think it very likely that Harold Macmillan met Harrison himself. After all, he knew well other famous authors whom the family firm published, like Hardy, Kipling and Conrad.

In any case, Harrison died in 1923 and it is possible that in the 1980s I met someone else who met him.

Harrison went up to Oxford in 1848 where he met Martin Routh, who was then still President of Magdalen College, despite having been born in 1755. 

When Routh was a little boy he met an old lady who, as a girl, saw King Charles II walking his spaniels in Magdalen Grove. 

I, who this morning read the news about Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, am either five or six removes from the King of England who hid in the royal oak tree with Henry Wilmot to avoid being found by the Parliamentarian soldiers below, following the Battle of Worcester in 1651. Had they seen him he would have been tried and executed, like his father in 1649.

Sunday, 6 April 2025

McCarrick is dead. He was a part of a much bigger evil

Mr. (formerly Cardinal) Theodore "Uncle Ted" McCarrick has died. 

His predatory sexual advances to seminarians were well known even in the 1980s, apparently, but he became one of the most powerful men in the Catholic Church. 

Pope Francis was his protégé and cancelled the restrictions that Pope Benedict XVI had placed on Uncle Ted. 

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote: Chaucer and Margaret Thatcher

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote...

My favourite poet began his most famous work in the springtime of England, when we were devout Catholics. What would Chaucer think of us could he see us now, as I hope he can?

He'd certainly be pro-European as his England was half French, still essentially ruled by Norman French and indulgent of sexual sins except for men on men. 

I read in the early 1990s A.W. Ward's Life of Chaucer (1909) in the Macmillan Men of Letters series. Ward said that even though Chaucer's England was very different from ours the English were already very enterprising and good at business. 

I suddenly saw with much pain that I had been wrong about Mrs Thatcher. She was a conservative (In her time I had never thought she was) and trying to restore England.

Wednesday, 2 April 2025

I am one person away from Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy, four from Napoleon


 
From 'The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick-Maker: The Story of Britain Through Its Census, Since 1801' By Roger Hutchinson (2017)

I wrote before in this blog that Frederic Harrison said his first memory was of his father paying a very rare visit to the nursery in 1837 and saying,
'Frederic, I am going to tell you something now that you will remember for the rest of your life. The King is dead.'