Harry’s Place

Dear Reader,
I will get to the “but” presently. Indulge me for a few paragraphs…
The growing popularity of blogging and so-called “citizen journalism” was once seen as a challenge to the traditional media. As news sources, blogs could sometimes dramatically scoop print and broadcast media, but I don’t think any serious media commentator honestly ever thought […]

In a recent post about paleoconservative Pat Buchanan’s latest book– about Churchill, Hitler and World War II– I noted with some puzzlement his opinion that a hands-off policy by Britain and the US toward Hitler’s aggression in eastern Europe could have prevented the Holocaust.
I wrote:
[G]iven that the vast majority of Europe’s Jews were in Germany […]

I didn’t read Pat Buchanan’s anti-non-white-immigration screed of two years ago. And I have no intention of reading his latest opus Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World.
But Stephen Colbert’s rather amusing interview with a fulminating Buchanan probably tell us all we need to […]

Given the amount of “weirdness and nastiness” that has been floating around good old ‘arry’s place of late, it was quite a relief to find, by chance, some good old London common sense, over at the pages of Diamond Geezer
(note for non-Londoners, and especially non-Brits: “Diamond Geezer” is London slang for someone who is…a good […]

Back in January, a short piece I posted here mentioned the plight of Dedalus Books, a rather fine literary publishing house in London threatened with closure as a result of losing Arts Council funding.
Well, now there’s some good news. A dashing knight in white armour has been found: Another, considerably larger, and no less fine, […]

A couple of years back, I was in Warsaw doing some work with Agora, the Polish publishing group. Agora is responsible for Gazeta Wyborcza, the first non-Communist controlled newspaper to published in post-Solidarity Poland. It has a left-of-centre editorial slant (unsurprisingly) and supported the intervention in Iraq. Adam Michnik has been chief editor since its […]

Having several times enjoyed the 1941 movie “The Maltese Falcon”– with its classic performances by Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet– while at the same time being rather confused by the plot, I recently read the source for the film: Dashiell Hammett’s detective novel of the same name, a 1961 paperback edition of which […]

Dead at 84.
I read Slaughterhouse-Five many years ago, and was quite moved by it. I thought it combined reality and imagination with a degree of genius. For some reason, though, I never read any of his other novels– maybe because I feared I would be disappointed.
Politically, his heart was in the Left place. Of course […]

Norm was kind enough to link to my lengthy essay in The Nation, a review of four books about genocide, so I’ll share it here as well.
It’s an American-style review, so it is about much more than just the books.

In The Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Andrei Markovits’s book Uncouth Nation, about anti-Americanism among western European elites.
The Romanian-born Markovits, who writes for the democratic socialist journal Dissent, claims “a life-long affinity with the democratic left in Europe and the United States.”
Yardley quotes some telling passages from his book, including these:
“Ambivalence, antipathy, and resentment toward […]