“Up until New Year 1943 Goebbels and his minions had portrayed Nazi Germany as the harbinger of a New Order for Europe, a new social, political and economic system that would sweep away the decadent, failed and discredited wreckage of the Old Europe that had perished in the Great War of 1914-18. Nazism had been portrayed as youthful, vibrant, dynamic and irresistible. But now all that had changed. The 6th Army [trapped and collapsing at Stalingrad] was hailed as being a legion of heroes worthy of the finest traditions of the ancient Teutonic warriors. The spirit of Arminius, who had ousted the Romans from Germany, was invoked, along with that of Frederick the great, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Blücher and many more. This was the reason behind the promotions and the awards. The 6th Army had to be built up to be the finest that Germany had ever fielded. In truth it was good, but it had never been as good as Goebbels now claimed. The message that Goebbels was slowly and carefully crafting was that the 6th Army was heroically sacrificing itself to save the ancient civilization of Europe from the onslaught of the barbaric Asiatic hordes pouring out of Siberia.”

Rupert Matthews Stalingrad: The Battle that Shattered Hitler’s Dream of World Domination

“Yet if this was the kind of talk that would see [the Marquis de] Sade spend his final years consigned to a lunatic asylum, the icy pitilessness of his gaze was not insanity. More clearly than many enthusiasts for enlightenment cared to recognize, he could see that the existence of human rights was no more provable than the existence of God.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.

“The artist behind a new, much debated portrait of Catherine, Princess of Wales, probably knew she was wading into touchy territory when she took up a commission to paint one of the most closely watched people on the planet. In an interview with Tatler magazine, which commissioned the portrait for its July cover, artist Hannah Uzor… Her portraits aim to capture ‘the soul of the person,’ Uzor said. But for many, the portrait resulting from that close study depicted neither the princess’s soul, nor even her physical characteristics. In response to the painting — showing a calm-looking figure in a fluid white gown against a buoyant blue backdrop — several commenters asked, ‘Who is this?’ ‘The painting is beautiful but does not look like the princess,’ one noted. Others were more direct in their criticism, calling the piece ‘an insult’ and ‘terrible.’… Uzor’s portrait comes just days after a portrait of King Charles III drew its own round of criticism. It also recalls public fury at Amy Sherald’s Michelle Obama portrait in 2018, which viewers similarly argued did not look like her. But with so much public critique centered on resemblance, it’s worth asking if likeness is the right metric for evaluating portraiture. When we have seemingly endless photographic representations of people such as the princess, some say portraits can — and even should — have wider aspirations. ‘Portraiture can be representational or abstract. There are no boundaries or limits,’ Bree Pickering, the director of the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, said in an email. ‘Likeness is often something that audiences look for, but as we’ve seen recently, it can be the conversation that happens around the artwork that tells us the most about the times we live in.’ Pickering also notes that ‘portraiture shares a story from an artist’s point of view,’ meaning that it tells viewers about the subject — but can also reveal the ‘broader social context in which it was created.’ Lisa Mansfield, an art historian who studies portraiture at the University of Adelaide, draws a parallel between Uzor’s portrait and Paul Emsley’s official portrait of the then-Duchess of Cambridge, ‘which was unveiled in 2013 to a disparaging chorus of disapproval.’ Such clashes between ‘artistic intention and audience perception reveal the disconnect between what a portrait is and what the world at large thinks a portrait of a princess should look like,’ Mansfield wrote in an email, adding that in an age of social media and selfies, it’s ‘easy to overlook that a portrait is fundamentally a work of artful fiction’ and ‘not a facsimile of the face or body.’ Contemporary artists have long taken creative liberties in depicting leaders….Cherine Fahd, an artist and professor of visual communication at the University of Technology Sydney, wrote in an email that when looking at the Princess Kate portrait, questions like ‘Does the portrait provoke dialogue?’ and ‘Does it reflect or challenge societal contexts?’ are ‘better than “Does it look her?”‘”

Washington Post May 23, 2024

“If our government were really a representative government, it would certainly not be a meddlesome government.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Nov. 15, 1924 quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

“For the British the war was a practical necessity, a sentiment captured by the slogan ‘business as usual.’ As one soldier put it in a letter to his parents on October 1, 1914: ‘We are just at the beginning of the struggle I’m afraid, and every hour we should remind ourselves that it is our great privilege to save the traditions of all centuries behind us. It’s a grand opportunity, and we must spare no effort to use it, for if we fail we shall curse ourselves in bitterness every year that we live, and our children will despise our memory.’ For the Germans this was a war to change the world; for the British this was a war to preserve a world. The Germans were propelled by a vision, the British by a legacy. For the average British soldier there was no question of who was responsible for the war.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“Bishops demanded to know of Darwin’s defenders the precise details of their descent from gorillas; satirists delighted in portraying Darwin himself as an ape; Cope declared his belief that humanity had evolved from a lemur. Yet not all the debating society sallies, not all the cartoons of monkeys in frock coats, not all the theorizing about possible lines of human descent could entirely conceal what yawned behind them: an immense abyss of anxiety and doubt. Nervousness at the idea that humanity might have evolved from another species was not bred merely of a snobbery towards monkeys. Something much more was at stake. To believe that God had become man and suffered the death of a slave was to believe that there might be strength in weakness, and victory in defeat. Darwin’s theory, more radically than anything that previously had emerged from Christian civilization, challenged that assumption. Weakness was nothing to be valued. Jesus, by commending the meek and the poor over those better suited to the great struggle for survival that was existence, had set homo sapiens upon the downward path towards degeneration. For eighteen long centuries, the Christian conviction that all human life was sacred had been underpinned by one doctrine more than any other: that man and woman were created in God’s image. The divine was to be found as much in the pauper, the convict or the prostitute as it was in the gentleman with his private income and book-lined study.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Now the modern critic is a humbug, because he professes to be entirely inarticulate. Speech is his whole business; and he boasts of being speechless. Before Botticelli he is mute. And the eulogists of the latest artistic insanities (Cubism and Post-Impressionism and Mr. Picasso) are eulogists and nothing else. They are not critics; least of all creative critics. They do not attempt to translate beauty into language; they merely tell you that it is untranslatable – that is, unutterable, indefinable, indescribable, impalpable, ineffable, and all the rest of it. The cloud is their banner; they cry to chaos and old night. They circulate a piece of paper on which Mr. Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried to dry it with his boots, and they seek to terrify democracy by the good old anti-democratic muddlements: that ‘the public’ does not understand these things; that ‘the likes of us’ cannot dare to question the dark decisions of our lords.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Mystagogue” in A Miscellany of Men, quoted in “Art Criticism” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

“Jerome K. Jerome, author of the enormously successful Three Men in a Boat, took the line that the sporting spirit was the essence of civilization and called on the Germans to treat the war as ‘The Greatest Game of All’: ‘Come, gentlemen, let us make an honorable contest of it, that shall leave as little bitterness behind it as may be. Let us see if we cannot make a fine game of it that we shall be all the better for having played out to the end. From which we shall all come back home cleaner minded, clearer seeing, made kinder to one another by suffering. Come, gentlemen, you believe that God has called upon you to spread German culture through the lands. You are ready to die for your faith. And we believe God has a use for the thing called England. Well, let us fight it out. There seems no other way. You for St. Michael and we for St. George; and God be with us both. But do not let us lose our common humanity in the struggle. That were the worst defeat of all: the only defeat that would really matter, that would really be really lasting. Let us call it a game. After all, what else is it?’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era