There are people who say “you can just do things”, and then there are people who at the age of fourteen stow away on an ocean-going vessel heading who-knows-where. Niccolao Manucci was the latter sort, and he held out down in that ship’s hold as long as he could, until hunger got the best of him. In fact, he lasted so long that when he finally gave in and presented himself to the captain it would have been inconvenient and uneconomical to return him to his parents in Venice. As the sailors debated whether to toss him overboard, press him into service, or maroon him on the closest bit of coastline, young Niccolao went and chatted up the other passengers. One of them, Lord Henry Bellomont, had recently escaped death at the hands of Oliver Cromwell, and invited Manucci to accompany him on an important mission to Persia.
That sounded pretty good to the teenager, so he disembarked with Bellomont at Smyrna, made the hazardous journey across Ottoman Anatolia, thence through Armenia, and finally to the Safavid Empire, where Bellomont declared himself an ambassador from the rightful king of England and sought Persian intervention in the English Civil War (!). The Shah was horrified by the regicide and amazed that the other Christian kings of Europe had not come to the aid of Charles I,1 but gently rebuffed Bellomont’s request by pointing out that it would be quite impractical to send a large army from Persia to England.
Frustrated, Bellomont set off once again with his young charge, this time to the Mughal Empire. He got as far as the port of Surat, where he suddenly died, leaving the teenage Manucci completely on his own, thousands of miles from his home, in the middle of a civil war.
I sometimes wonder how often this sort of thing happens without us ever finding out. Perhaps history is full of ridiculous people having ridiculous adventures, it’s just that most of them aren’t Zhu Yuanzhang, or they don’t write detailed memoirs, or those memoirs are lost or destroyed before they reach us. Something like this very nearly happened to Manucci. The Venetian teenager left all alone in India not only survived, but flourished socially and financially, lived to a ripe old age, and wrote thousands of pages of penetrating social observations. His account is both the most entertaining and the most reliable history of the Mughal Empire at its zenith. Manucci had the singular talent of moving through every social circle, from the royal court to the lowest of peasants. He interacted with generals and statesmen, harem attendants, Islamic jurists, Hindu sages, elephant drivers,2 Portuguese mercenaries, eunuchs, merchants, prostitutes, common soldiers, missionaries, beggars, and even the emperor himself. There are very few cases where we get to see a premodern society laid out in all its intimate detail and from every angle, and we only missed losing this one by the barest of lucky strokes.
The story of Manucci’s manuscript is a twisting one. The original copies of his tale fell into the hands of a French Jesuit who mutilated the text — excising all the fun parts, all the personal observations, the adventure stories, and of course anything remotely critical of the Catholic Church. The resulting “edition” found its way back to India and into Manucci’s hands before his death. Naturally, he freaked out and tried to reproduce his original text from memory, sending it along with a letter of protest by sealed courier directly to the Venetian Senate. But this second copy is the work of a much older man, much farther from the stories and events described, and has numerous omissions and differences from the original.3 In 1763, the Jesuit order was expelled from France and their Paris library, including Manucci’s first manuscript, was seized by the state. It was then lost during the Revolution and believed destroyed, before turning up in damaged and partial form at an auction-house in Berlin a century later.
Countless European intellectuals have tried their hand at stitching the mishmash of fragments we have back into a cohesive whole, including a “J. Bernoulli” (yes, one of those Bernoullis, but I can’t figure out which brother it was). But everybody agrees the most successful of these efforts was that by William Irvine, a British colonial administrator and fellow of both the Royal Asiatic Society and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, who also helpfully translated the whole thing into English. Irvine’s edition has been republished many times, most recently by the wonderful people at Forgotten Books, which is how it found its way into my hands.4
Irvine is not the sort of editor who confines his remarks to a preface and some footnotes. Instead, he directly injects his own commentary inline, into the body of the text. These asides range from bracketed remarks like “[here I have deleted a coarse and obscene description]” all the way up to essays dozens of pages long containing his reflections and opinions on the text. And this is layered on top of the various modifications and emendations made by French Jesuits and Venetian scribes. All of this gives the book a meta-textual, almost postmodern feeling. It’s a bit like House of Leaves. Sometimes you’re reading Manucci, and sometimes you’re reading three nested layers of people commenting on people commenting on people commenting on Manucci. And the effect is heightened when you suddenly realize that Manucci, like the protagonist of a Gene Wolfe story, is not telling you all that he knows.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Storia do Mogor, by Niccolao Manucci”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-09-08.
- Bellomont’s only real success in his mission was to completely poison the well for all future European travelers in Persia. Manucci reports that the next Englishman to visit the court of the Shah was thrown into a dungeon for disloyalty to his liege lord (a story independently corroborated by the French adventurer Jean-Baptiste Tavernier). “[The shah’s] object was to give a lesson to his own nobles as to the manner in which they should serve their king and the fidelity they ought to display, when the occasion arose, in defence of their monarch.”
- The book contains extensive discussion of how all elephants and horses that the Mughal princes might want to ride are pre-ridden by an attendant, to “loosen its stomach” and eliminate any flatulence.
- This is actually a huge simplification — there are four distinct Venetian codices, all with major differences from each other.
- I started with the Forgotten Books paperback, but halfway through the first volume I was hooked, and seeing that I had a thousand pages left to go, picked up a handsome leatherbound set from a used book seller for a song. I would normally never dream of buying a second copy of a book I already own just because it feels nicer in my hands, but you, dear subscribers, have spoiled me.
January 1, 2026
QotD: Niccolao Manucci’s improbable early career
December 30, 2025
Childhood’s End (Youtube Copyright Edit)
Feral Historian
Published 30 Jul 2024The 2015 adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End has a lot going on. But Youtube won’t let me use clips from it, so here’s a stills-only recut covering the major points. A far superior cut is available at my Patreon page, along with a few other exclusives in what will surely be a growing collection of Youtube no-nos.
🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
December 29, 2025
What Do We ACTUALLY Know About Homer? (Author of Iliad & Odyssey)
MoAn Inc.
Published 23 Dec 2025
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December 27, 2025
Campaign Furniture by Christopher Schwarz
I try not to clutter the blog with woodworking-related posts, as I know it’s a niche interest among my readership, but every now and again I find something I just have to share. Today, it’s a post from Lost Art Press on the book Campaign Furniture written by Christopher Schwarz:
My 2014 book Campaign Furniture is now a free pdf download for everyone. You can download it via this link (a compressed version for slower connections is available here). And customers will always be able to download it from the book’s page in our store.
I’m a fan of the book … I ended up buying two copies through Lee Valley Tools (I loaned my first copy out and it got lost in the shipwreck of a friend’s messy divorce). I like Chris’s writing style and I’ve long been a fan of Campaign furniture.
Why Do I Do This?
I get asked by fellow publishers why I offer my books for free download. “Surely you use it to gather emails to market to readers.” Nope. “Are these out-of-print books that you are using to get eyeballs on your website?” Nope. “So what’s the strategy?”
I think – as much as possible – that information should be free. I think the best hope for inspiring other woodworkers is to give them whatever they need to begin in the craft.
And, I fu&%ing hate this world we’ve created where people can’t own anything. Companies come into your house and your phone and change things or take away stuff you’ve bought. Many times they take back stuff you owned then rent it back to you.
That’s why we make books. Buy a book from us, and it’s yours. Its contents can’t be changed by some ideologue a thousand miles away. All of our digital products are free of DRM (digital rights management). That means they can’t be locked or disabled. And you can copy them onto whatever device you like.
OK, the holiday rant is over.
I hope you find something of interest in Campaign Furniture. We still use three of the pieces from the book every day in our home. Other pieces are with my kids. So my family’s love of this neglected furniture style continues.
December 23, 2025
Vagabond by Tim Curry
Andrew Doyle reviews Tim Curry’s new autobiography Vagabond:
Tim Curry, Nell Campbell, Richard O’Brien and Patricia Quinn in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Tim Curry is a shapeshifter. I have a childhood memory of the moment I learned that the demon in Legend (1985), the villain in Annie (1982), the butler in Clue (1985) and the cross-dressing alien scientist in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) were all played by the same man. It was quite the revelation.
Curry’s protean talents have meant that as a personality he has forever remained mysterious. He rarely gives interviews – only grudgingly whenever there is a movie to promote – and fans have therefore tended to project onto this reclusive figure the persona that best fits their expectations or desires. When more insistent fans have formed an emotional bond with the Tim Curry of their imaginations, he has on occasion been forced to put them right. “I’m just a person,” he says, “and I’m not your person”.
Fans will therefore be delighted at the publication of Curry’s memoir, Vagabond, which offers fascinating snapshots from his life. The approach is episodic, with chapters devoted to particular projects in his career. As such, Curry offers us morsels in lieu of a meal. Those who are hoping for salacious anecdotes about his love life will be disappointed, because – as he rightly points out – “specifics about my affairs of the heart or the bedroom are – respectfully – none of your fucking business”. Instead, we have a wonderfully compelling account of Curry’s origins and how his philosophy of life has informed his craft.
Tim Curry as Wadsworth in Clue and King Arthur in Spamalot
His vagabond status has been well earned. As the child of a military father, he was forever on the move, and it is easy to see how these early experiences shaped his capacity to embody such a wide breadth of humanity. His first accolade came early when he was awarded the prize for the “Most Beautiful Baby in Hong Kong”. His family relocated roughly every eighteen months for the first eleven years of his life, which is why he tells us that “mutability felt like a part of my DNA”. It was the ideal apprenticeship for his future vocation.
Writing in 1817, William Hazlitt called actors the “motley representatives of human nature” who “show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be”. For his part, Curry sees the actor as the vagabond of his book’s title. “How can you trust somebody, or truly know somebody, who appears as a king one day and a jester the next? What does it mean when neither role is the true identity of the person, and when that very person might be gone the next day?” In this, he could be paraphrasing Hazlitt’s description of actors as “today kings, tomorrow beggars”, and how “it is only when they are themselves, that they are nothing”.
December 17, 2025
QotD: The origins of Progressivism
Vladimir Lenin, I’ll remind you, once famously said “The goal of socialism is communism”. Both are political and ethical “philosophies” based on taking stuff away from those who created it or earned it, and giving it to those who didn’t — who’ll vote for you. Collectivism, which is the generic term for both of these viewpoints and every other politic-economic scam like them, is nothing more than a pathetically transparent, sleazy attempt to make theft appear respectable. It’s always easier to take away or destroy than to create or build. Stealing from others became very popular in the first half of the 19th century (“Property is theft” — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) when it was formalized as an ideology.
From that beginning, 170 years ago, socialists began to imagine a bright, glowing, prosperous Utopian future for themselves, based entirely on theft. With every decade that passed, their physically, logically impossible fantasies became more and more real to them. It’s like the old psychiatrist joke that the difference between neurotics and psychotics is that neurotics build castles in the air, whereas psychotics move in and live in them.
The “Progressive” movement began to really blossom in the latter half of the 19th century. They were establishing socialist colonies practically everywhere. American socialist newspaper editor Horace Greeley told his readers, “Go west, young man” and to establish socialist colonies. Looking Backward, a badly-written socialist screed by Edward Bellamy and more-talented others like H. G. Wells’ When the Sleeper Wakes and The Time Machine became immensely popular. The idea of an inevitable, unstoppable socialist “wave of the future” became popular and lasted at least until I was in college in the 1960s.
L. Neil Smith, “Why They Hate Donald Trump”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-12-30.
December 14, 2025
Andrea Dworkin – feminism’s anti-sex evangelist
On her Substack, Janice Fiamengo examines the life and work of Andrea Dworkin, whose influence on modern feminism is still quite strong, twenty years after her death:
A friend wrote a couple of days ago to say that he had seen shiny new copies of works by feminist author Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) in Munro’s Books, one of Canada’s premier independent bookstores. One of the books was positioned on a shelf with the cover facing out to indicate that it was being showcased.
It is both shocking and unsurprising that Picador Books decided to reprint three of Dworkin’s texts in the past year, calling her a “prescient and visionary writer” who was “ahead of her time”. Anti-male paranoia is a sanctioned, cultivated taste more popular now, perhaps, than ever before, and Andrea Dworkin is its most notorious propagandist.
Known for her physical bulk, impassioned rhetoric, unkempt hair, and lesbian-identified overalls, Dworkin was a feminist icon in the 1980s and 90s, loved and hated in equal measure. No one did more to outline and consolidate the modern feminist understanding of sex than she, writing on the subject obsessively and with unparalleled fervor in books with titles such as Woman Hating (1974) and Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981). The MeToo movement is almost unimaginable without the influence of Dworkin’s pronouncements.
Like other radical feminists, Dworkin wrote about rape, pornography, and prostitution, but her special focus was the degradation for women of sex itself: regular sex, the commonly accepted, normalized indignity that men allegedly inflict on women every day. Tempering her words in the white-heat of her revulsion, Dworkin became feminism’s anti-sex evangelist.
Sex, Dworkin believed, embodied nothing less than men’s hatred of everything female: “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women” (p. 175). This is the thesis of her most representative book, Intercourse, which was first published in 1987 when Dworkin was 41 years old. Dworkin’s characterization of heterosexual sex as the ultimate enactment of misogyny has had an enduring impact on North American culture.
Intercourse set out to illuminate, through select readings of literary texts, what Dworkin believed to be a constant of male culture: the “hatred of women, unexplained, undiagnosed, mostly unacknowledged, that pervades sexual practice and sexual passion” (pp. 175-76). The phrase she most often used in the book to refer to intercourse was “the fuck”, which was meant to signify the raw dehumanization that supposedly characterized it.
Dworkin nominated herself the expert on male contempt for women because she had been its victim. “Specifically, am I saying that I know more than men about fucking?” she asked defiantly in the book’s preface, and answered, “Yes, I am […] the way anyone used knows the user” (p. xxxi).
While she also claimed in the preface that the book “does not say that all men are rapists or that all intercourse is rape” (p. xxxii), she does essentially say that, if not in quite those words. As she asserted only a page after the denial, “Intercourse conveys […] what it means that men — and now boys — feel entitled to come into the privacy of a woman’s body in a context of inequality” (p. xxxiv).
In another segment, she clarified that most, even the vast majority, of men were sexually abusive. She charged that men object to feminist criticism of pornography and prostitution because “So many men use these ignoble routes of access and domination to get laid,” that “without them the number of fucks would so significantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste” (p. 61). The implication was that men who objected to her arguments about the omnipresence of sexual exploitation were themselves sexual abusers who didn’t like the thought of their exploitation being curtailed.
This was the Dworkin who made feminists swoon with admiration: bombastic, hyperbolic, and incandescent with accusatory rage.
A Fire Upon The Deep and the Identity Gradient
Feral Historian
Published 8 Aug 2025Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep would take a two-hour video to completely dissect. This is not that video. Instead, I’m looking just at the recurring ideas of collective identity and distributed consciousness. And all without a single mention of Skroderiders.
This one has been sitting around for about a year, due to lack of b-roll to cover the numerous jumpcuts due to my rambling and the rather persistent flies on that particular day. It’s a little rough, but let’s just roll with it.
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December 10, 2025
Fantasy or Sci-Fi? I Pick …
Jill Bearup
Published 28 Jul 2025Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, what have you done this time?
Let us stop lying to children about the world they’ll have to face
Recommendations for good books intended for young readers is pretty far from my usual bailiwick, so I’ll let John Carter step in with his suggestion that Fables for Young Wolves is worth your attention:
“You should move to a small town, somewhere the rule of law still exists. You will not survive here. You are not a wolf, and this is a land of wolves now.” – Sicario (2015)
Children’s literature has gotten soft. Disney turned every woodland creature into a cute little forest friend, and tacked a happy ending onto every dark fairy tale. The bloodstains were scrubbed out, death was swept under the rug, and the moral lessons became saccharine platitudes about being kind and sharing … a helpful aid to management of kindergarten classrooms, perhaps, but worse than useless for the moral instruction of the young, who will one day need to navigate a world where the shadows of the human soul conceal sharpened knives, and the truth is not always what well-meaning young women with associates degrees in early childhood education might wish. Children go along with it, but deep down they know that they’re being lied to, that the adult are keeping something from them when they pretend that every story has a happy ending, that everyone can be friends and get along if they’re just sufficiently nice to one another.
Contemporary children’s literature has gotten even worse under the pressure of politics, with bookshelves filling with stories about antiracist babies who grow up to become boys who become girls, and girls who save themselves from dragons and therefore don’t need help from the boys who foolishly refused to become girls. This is less moral instruction than moral inversion, literature meant to turn children against their own natures, stories that deliberately deceive developing minds in order to neuter them, soften them, make them malleable and unthreatening for a managerial culture in which the socially acceptable lie is always preferable to the uncomfortable truth.
Fables For Young Wolves is not that sort of book.
Triumph of the Wolves by Ernest Thompson Seton (1892)
The stories in Fables For Young Wolves are true fables in the Aesopian tradition: tales in which animals are used as symbols for particular facets of human character, or for particular kinds of humans. Foxes are wily, crows are wise but conniving, pigs are greedy and vulgar, asses are stupid, sheep are conformist and dull, dogs are loyal but credulous.
For after being brought up from childhood with these stories, and after being as it were nursed by them from babyhood, we acquire certain opinions of the several animals and think of some of them as royal animals, of others as silly, of others as witty, and others as innocent. – Apollonius, on Aesop (quoted in the foreword).
The titular wolves around whom the fables revolve are true wolves: noble, cruel, cunning, vicious enemies to their foes but faithful to a fault to their friends, playing roles of villain, victim, and hero as each tale requires. As the most psychologically complex of the animals, they stand for everything that is highest in the human soul, and so are also suited to plumb the depths. These are not Disneyfied vegan wolves that make friends with rabbits: these wolves are hunters and killers, and unashamed of it.
Illustration by Monachvs.
Thomas O. Bethlehem‘s fables are intended, as all fables should be, to impart lessons about human nature and about the world, not as we might wish it to be but as it is, with the intent that the young reader will be guided away from bad decisions and towards the good. Many of the stories are anecdotes of a couple of pages, which communicate simple ideas about controlling your base impulses, having your friend’s back, knowing who your real friends are, the consequences of helping those who cannot be helped, and so on. Interspersed between these are longer and more psychologically complex tales which build upon well-known folk-tales such as “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”, “The Three Little Pigs”, “The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing”, and “Little Red Riding Hood”.
December 8, 2025
“Canadian culture” apparently doesn’t include books anymore
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte considers what the omission of financial goodies for the Canadian publishing industry in the latest federal budget (unlike the CBC, music, film and TV subsidies) says about the government’s view of what “Canadian culture” actually is:
You might have noticed that last month’s federal budget introduced a whack of new cultural spending. The CBC got another $150 million, the Canada Music Fund took $48 million, film and television raked in over $300 million. Books? Nothing.
The budget’s rationales for this new spending are to foster a sense of cultural identity and belonging in Canada, to sustain an informed citizenship, and to protect vulnerable industries. The unwritten context is the recent American assault on Canada’s independence. You would think there would be room for books in this sort of budget. Is there anything more foundational to Canadian identity and an informed citizenry than books by Canadians and about Canada?
Yet somehow our political leadership overlooked the literary sector. It’s odd. The first thing our politicians do when they want to explain or advance their own careers is knock on a publisher’s door.
Granted, it’s usually the door of an American publisher, because the net result of our government’s efforts to nurture the publishing sector in Canada over the last several decade has been to drive Canadian-published books from more than 20 percent of those sold in Canada to less than 5 percent. We have the weakest domestic publishing industry in the developed world. Our prime ministers think nothing of taking their books to New York-based Penguin Random House or Simon & Schuster. Most of our most prominent fiction writers give all their North American rights to US publishers instead of separating out Canadian rights and leaving them with a Canadian publisher. It’s a travesty.
I have a solution. In fact, I have many solutions. I have a whole book of solutions coming in January from Canadian public policy guru Richard Stursberg. It looks like this:
Richard’s solutions are not the same as my solutions. I like his, too. I’m not picky. I’m going to flood the zone with solutions and hope people in Ottawa wake up to the fact that we have a problem. The solutions will almost all involve more public support of the industry, not because I’m keen on public support of the industry, but because we have ample proof that the alternative to more public support is no domestic book publishing industry. Also, if you’ve been following us here (see SHuSH 232, The Wasteland), you know this is a “you broke it, you own it” moment for our federal government.
So here’s my solution de jour. Given that books are fundamental to any notion of Canadian identity, given that our domestic publishing sector is pathetically weak, given that any self-respecting country needs to be able to publish its own stories rather than rely on the branch plants of an increasingly difficult neighbour to do it for us, we arrange the following.
We massively expand Canada’s public lending right program (PLR). At present, the ridiculously underfunded PLR pays out about $15 million a year to some 20,000 authors whose books are circulated in Canada’s public libraries. The distributions are based on a complicated formula that mostly notices how many libraries hold the author’s book. It’s capped at $4,500 an author, and most receive only a few hundred dollars annually.
We expand the PLR’s spending envelope by a factor of ten: $150 million. Does that sound like a lot of money? It’s not. It comes to about $3.75 per capita. That’s about a tenth of what we spend annually on the CBC, which employs roughly the same number of people as book publishing. It’s about a tenth of what we spend in direct funding and tax credits on film & television. It’s less than half what we’re spending on newspaper and magazine subsidies. A small price to rebuild a decimated publishing sector.
I think you could argue that the dollar amount should be much higher. As a society, we believe that books are more important than the products of other media. The governments don’t give you free cable or a free opera pass or a free spotify subscription: they give you free books through public libraries, because books are that important to the well-being of our citizenry. We’re so good at promoting the value of our public libraries that four out of every five books read in Canada are borrowed rather than bought. If books are that important, $150 million is a bargain.
December 6, 2025
The least offensive kind of soft power – The Rest is History
Ed West recounts his (very) early discovery of The Rest is History, a podcast featuring Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland (not that Tom Holland, I’m told). I’ve been a (free) subscriber on YouTube for the last year or two, but Ed got there much earlier than I did:
The Rest is History must be the only thing of which I can say that I was into it before it was popular, my sole experience of being an early adopter. I remember listening to the very first episode as soon as it was released, during Lockdown 2, because I had been a fan of Tom Holland for years and followed him on Twitter. Straight away, I knew that it would be an enormous success, because even people who rarely watched history documentaries or read history books would find it entertaining.
And now, as they say, “the rest is history” (ho ho). The programme has just been named Apple Podcasts Show of the Year 2025, the first ever British winner, and is beyond successful, into the realm of “phenomenon”. When television writers in the distant future make dramas set in the 2020s and wish to give immediate shorthand to establish the decade, they’ll put The Rest is History soundtrack somewhere in the background, just as they always have Tears for Fears playing on the radio during any drama set in the 80s.
It became such a huge part of my life that, when cooking or cleaning and unresponsive to questions, the children came to learn that I must be listening to “Tom and Dom” on my AirPods. Initially, of course, when I mentioned that I had actually met Tom Holland a few times, they’d respond with awe until they realised that I was not talking about the Spiderman actor. It became a running joke about “your Tom Holland” rather than the “famous” one.
During the golden years of television there were a number of shows which became so commonly popular in one’s friendship circles that they were routinely talked about – The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones – but there were always plenty of people who had never watched them; there’s so much choice, after all, and the media culture has fragmented.
As Tom and Dom discussed on an old episode about the 1990s, that was the last period when the whole country had a common popular culture. Yet The Rest is History is approaching something close to that. It’s become so all-pervading that literally everyone I know, or ever speak to, listens to it. Perhaps I live in a bubble, but it’s a warm and cosy bubble filled with chat about the Kaiser’s deck shoes and Costa Rica’s infamous Dr Valverde, a sick and twisted psychopath who liked to torture frogs. The word I’d use to describe the show is “wholesome”, a term they’re fond of, an escape from the modern world, without rancour, hectoring or — crucially — swearing.
I realised that it must have become something more than popular when I read that it was the biggest podcast in Finland. Admittedly the Finnish market is not globally important, but this obviously wasn’t some quirky localised fanbase, like Norman Wisdom in Albania. It had become big everywhere, including the largest market of all; to use an analogy that Holland might appreciate, they’d reached their Ed Sullivan moment.
[…]
All the great drama series of the 2000s I mentioned were American, and I’d even go as far as to argue that The Rest is History is now Britain’s main cultural export and proponent of soft power. While the case might be made for the Premier League or Warhammer, the Goalhanger production has far more sway on international elites and how educated, cultured people around the world see our country.
Foreigners tend to value an idea of Britishness characterised by classiness and erudition, but also humour and modesty. Yet the global popularity of our national brand is out of tune with what our own cultural elites value, which reflects their sense of cringe but often comes across as strangely parochial and inward-looking. Two erudite historians who wear their scholarship lightly, whose interests are openly Anglocentric but reflect a passionate interest in the world beyond our island, talking to the audience like a pair of friendly academics in a cosy pub in Oxford – that’s the fantasy they want.
Fans are always conscious that any show will pass its peak, and then start to decline as everyone runs out of ideas. There’s no sign of it yet, and the good thing about history is that it’s literally endless, and you can always return to the subject at greater length. Their recent series on Nelson was outstanding, despite covering previous ground, and nothing says the holiday season like that festive subject, the Nazis. I can’t wait for the eleven-episode series about the Costa Rican Civil War.
December 5, 2025
“I can stop [buying books] anytime. It’s not an addiction!”
In The Freeman, Nichole James resists the notion that her bookbuying habit is an addiction (because she could stop anytime she wants, unlike addicts who clearly can’t ever stop):
A small portion of my own book hoard. These shelves at least have a bit of commonality to them, unlike a lot of other shelves I could share.
There are people who collect sensible things, like pensions or matching dining chairs. Then there are people like me, who collect books and then build new shelves to hold the books, then buy more books to fill the shelves, then realize the house is now 70% paper.
I have always loved books. The magical lands they open up, the lives you try on for a few hundred pages. Places you cannot reach with a passport and an airline ticket. Narnia, Hogwarts, Mordor, and the parts of Sydney where even Google Maps looks nervous. The whole lot. Some people fall in love with the smell. Others with the weight of someone’s thoughts in their hands. I fall in love with all of that and then apparently forget that my house has finite wall space.
Which is why, as I call the carpenter for “just one more bookshelf”, a tiny voice in my head wonders if this is still charming or if I now qualify for some kind of diagnosis.
As it turns out, I might. The diagnosis even has a very fancy Greek name: bibliomania.
Back in the 19th century, an English cleric called Thomas Frognall Dibdin wrote a whole book called Bibliomania, or, Book Madness. He gleefully catalogued the symptoms of the afflicted: obsession with first editions, uncut pages, vellum, rare bindings, and the sort of Moroccan leather that smells faintly of money and self-satisfaction. It was a time when collectors bid like lunatics at auctions, paid “fancy prices”, and were generally regarded as slightly cracked.
That was then. Now, we call it a “TBR pile” — To-Be-Read.
Today, psychologists define bibliomania as a type of compulsive buying disorder. The warning signs are sobering. You buy more books than you can possibly read. You feel out of control. You get into financial trouble. You feel guilty. Your loved ones begin sentences with “Do you really need …?” and gesture helplessly at the tottering stack of paperbacks by the bed.
I recognize a few of these symptoms. I have definitely skipped a meal to afford a hardback. I have walked into a bookshop to “just browse” and come out clutching a small tower and a freshly re-mortgaged soul. There are hardbacks I have moved house with three times that I haven’t yet opened. They look at me accusingly whenever I walk past, like neglected gym memberships in dust jackets.
But here is where I part ways with the diagnosticians and join the Church of Umberto Eco.
Eco, the Italian novelist and semiotician with the beard of a wizard and the library of a dragon, reportedly owned around 50,000 books. He did not consider this a problem. He considered it a system. He said it was foolish to think you have to read every book you buy, just as it would be foolish to insist you must use every screwdriver before you are allowed to own another one.
Books, in his view, are like medicine. You keep a lot in the cabinet. Most of the time they sit there harmlessly. Then one day, in some dark night of the soul or slow Wednesday in July, you need the exact one that will fix you. So you reach into your “medicine cupboard” and pull out the right book for that moment. Which, he argued, is exactly why you should always have more than you need.
This is the philosophy I am choosing to live by, rather than the one that suggests I should be monitored by a spending app and gently reintroduced to the public library.
December 2, 2025
Dead Wrong: How Canada got the Residential School story so wrong
Juno News shares Candice Malcolm‘s foreword to Dead Wrong by C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan:
Canada is off track. We’ve lost our way.
How else could we make sense of the moral panic produced from a half-baked report coming from a small Indian Band in Central British Columbia in the spring of 2021? In response, the country lost its mind. Following reports of 215 “unmarked graves” at the site of the former Kamloops Residential School, the supposedly trusted sources of our society – journalists, elected officials, academics and so-called experts – reported fiction as fact, without doing any due diligence or research into the still unproven and questionable claims of mass graves and secret midnight burials of hundreds of deceased children.
A failure of this magnitude doesn’t happen instantaneously. It’s built over time as those who profess to speak the truth deliver deception, doublespeak, and misinformation – all in the name of addressing some grievance, advancing an agenda, and creating a narrative.
The only conclusion we can now draw is that our country is not what it should be, not what it was.
There are a myriad of complicated reasons to explain our clear downward trajectory – institutional capture, a hard-left consensus among political and cultural elites (driven in large part by government-funded journalists and the state broadcaster pushing woke propaganda), a large and inefficient bureaucracy that stifles growth and
innovation, institutions built upon a moral code that became unfashionable, and so on.
Canada has become a feminist country that proudly discriminates against men and diminishes the role of mothers. It has become a post-national country that loathes its founders and openly discriminates against individuals based on skin colour. It isn’t just post-Christian, it’s anti-Christian – evident from the treatment of Evangelical prayer leader Sean Feucht, the coordinated attacks against him in the summer of 2025 and the cancellation of tour stops across the country, not to mention total disinterest and cover-up of the 120+ churches that have been decimated and destroyed in the wake of the unmarked graves fiasco.
Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed our country fall from a functional system, into something almost unrecognizable.
The Canada I grew up in was safe, stable and secure. We knew our neighbours, we trusted institutions and didn’t worry too much about politics. Being Canadian meant something. We had a community, an identity, a shared purpose. Most of us believed in upward mobility and the Canadian dream: that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will have the same – or dare I say better – opportunities and quality of life than your parents.
This is clearly no longer the case for most Canadians under the age of 45, and that is a major problem for all of us.
I came across a simple social graph by William Meijer that clearly explains what has happened better than anything else I’ve seen. You could apply this to countries, companies and even personal relationships.
Simply put: kindness got in the way of truth.
Meijer writes the accompanying caption: “An extreme commitment to the truth makes relationships acutely dysfunctional but systems chronically functional (think Elon Musk).
An extreme commitment to kindness makes relationships acutely functional but systems chronically dysfunctional (think Sweden, UK).”
Canada perhaps represents the “kind dysfunction” better than any other place.
November 28, 2025
QotD: Life is not a race to some arbitrary “finish line”
I wrote:
The hostility to inheritance also comes from a mistaken sense of fairness. As Robert Nozick argued in Anarchy, State and Utopia (I quote from memory), people wrongly think life resembles an athletics race, where the racers compete to hit the finishing line. As a result, those “lucky” athletes endowed by nature/god whatever with stronger muscles etc must be handicapped by having weights in their shoes, for example. Just as a child of rich parents must be deliberately held back to give poor kids a more “fair” chance of winning. But as Nozick said, life isn’t like that. It is about people exchanging goods, services and ideas with one another. There’s no fixed end-point to which we are all racing.
Also, the idea that there is some “prize” that humans compete for implies that someone or some entity has created that “prize” in the first place. But that’s smuggling in a sort of communitarian assumption into the actions of individuals. In an open society, the prizes on offer are varied and multiply constantly.
I should add that the second section of Nozick’s renowned book dissects and ultimately rejects forced redistribution for egalitarian or other forms of “patterned” notions of justice, and he robustly defends what he calls an “entitlement” concept of justice.
One of the approaches that the late Prof. Nozick used was the thought experiment, such as the example referenced above about a fictitious athletics race in which the entrants are hampered/favoured to make the race more “even”, and then assuming that society in general should be like this. A race, held by people who know the rules and seek to abide by them, is not like an open society. “Open” is the key word here: there is no single end to which persons are heading, such as winning the race.
And yet a lot of the metaphors one comes across around discussions around equality, including equality of opportunity as well as outcome, seem to borrow, perhaps unwittingly, from this “race competition” worldview. To give another example, I remember reading some months ago about a university professor (Warwick) who suggested that when parents read stories to their children, this is a form of privilege. This also plays to the idea that life has a fixed end-measure of success, so that anyone giving a value to someone else is giving the latter an unfair “head start” on someone else. It would require a State to exercise totalitarian control of our actions from the moment we wake up to go to sleep lest our actions unfairly advantage/hamper someone in the “race” they are considered, by this worldview, to be on. (It also, by the way, shows that today’s Higher Ed. is full of certifiable fools and worse.)
Johnathan Pearce, “The assault on inheritance and the assumptions that drive it”, Samizdata, 2025-08-21.
