“As might be expected from [C.S.] Lewis, he gave his lecture a Latin title: ‘De Descriptione Temporum,’ which might be rendered into English as ‘A Description of Time.’ He had long argued that the rigid way of describing the Renaissance as a sudden break with the past was simply incorrect. In fact, all of the great divisions of time lacked clear landmarks to set them apart. Change takes place over a period of many centuries, with one exception. He argued that a change between the period of Jane Austen and when he was speaking in 1954 was unlike any other change in culture throughout world history. He noted the recent symposium on T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘A Cooking Egg’ in which seven leading scholars could not agree on what the poem means. He noted the un-Christianizing of the West, which had accelerated since Austen’s time. He noted the way in which politics had become ‘the organization of mass excitement,’ or what Punch called ‘Govertisement.’ Finally, he noted that with the success of the machine, the culture had moved to viewing what is new is good and what is old is bad. The result was that education has shifted from the development of character to the acquisition of technical skill and the assimilation of data. In his inaugural lecture, Lewis painted a picture of a world in which people had lost the ability to make value judgments because of the disappearance of values.”

Harry Lee Poe The Completion of C.S. Lewis

The late Francois Furet, a French historian of totalitarianism, “copiously illustrates this thesis: that people believe what they want to believe, as long as it is possible to believe it; and that they generally return to believing it, once the crisis has passed. For how else can we explain the dogged loyalty to radical socialism, in the face of repeated butcheries?”

David Warren in Ottawa Citizen May 28, 2000 [the trouble being that if “people” do it and the author is a person presumably he does it too and truth collapses]

“NBA legend Jerry West… had become an advocate for mental health, openly speaking about his battles with depression that traced back to childhood with an abusive father in poor, rural West Virginia… West took great umbrage to the HBO series ‘Winning Time,’ which cast him as an out-of-control executive prone to fits of rage. While HBO did not apologize to West, the network said ‘Winning Time’ should be viewed more as a dramatization and less as a documentary.”

NBC obituary of West June 12, 2024 [what a greasy way of admitting you lied maliciously].

“One of two Victoria crosses awarded during the battle of Kohima went to Lance Corporal John Harmon of the Royal West Kents for his brave exploits. Sniper Harman – who spent much of his boyhood on the remote Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel owned by his millionaire father Martin – sprang into action when he spotted a Japanese light machine gun team taking over a nearby trench. Without hesitation he sprinted some 35 yards towards the trench, flung a grenade which killed the two Japanese inside and returned to his line bearing a captured gun. Two days later on 9 April in cold, wet weather he repeated this astonishing performance, only this time there were five men in the trench armed with automatic weapons and he himself used a fixed bayonet rather than a grenade. ‘When all the enemies were dead he walked back to his lines ignoring his comrades’ pleas to run for cover. He was killed by a burst of fire and died, saying “I've got to go. It was worth it – I got the lot.”’ His actions kept the hill in British hands for the time being at least.”

Karen Farrington Victory in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor to the Fall of Okinawa [she does not footnote this or any quotation].

“Civil wars happen when the victimized are armed. Genocide happens when they are not.”

A.E. Samaan according to a graphic emailed by a friend December 21, 2025 [without further attribution].

“Looming behind Kennedy’s report [British surgeon Richard Hartley Kennedy’s 1825 account of suttee] was a horror of idolatry that reached back unbroken through Christian history. Cortez, confronted by racks of skulls and Tenochtitlan, and Boniface, venturing deep into the forests of Saxony, and Origen, scorning the blood-caked altars of Alexandria, had all borne witness to it. The venerable conviction that idols were raised to demons, witness to ‘the extent and power of Satan’s empire’, exerted a firm grip on British evangelicals.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [a conviction he appears to have believed, at least at time of writing, was unreasonable… but was it?]

“Academics mock introductory ‘History 200’ courses that take students ‘from Plato to NATO’ over the course of an academic year, but the alternative to students you know about Plato and NATO is not students who read Gibbon or von Ranke, and Plato and NATO are things everyone should know about, so there is a case for covering the basics.”

Mark F. Proudman in Dorchester Review #34 (Vol. 15, #4) Winter 2025

“Over the years, I’ve had dealings with many universities around the world. I’ve funded research centres, chairs and programs related to entrepreneurship, business management, engineering and technological innovation. I’ve also served on a number of university boards and given guest lectures on campuses in Canada, the United States and Europe. But until recently, it never occurred to me to consider the overriding purpose of a university. In conceiving and drafting the framework of an ideal society, universities should look at all aspects — everything from the arts and sports to business and medicine. They should also consider the ideal structure of government — one that ensures individual liberty and places certain checks on the power of elected officials. One of the ways we currently do that is through our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But what about other rights, including, most importantly, economic rights? Why has no society ever enshrined an economic charter of rights, and what should those rights be? One thing is clear: democratic charters of rights need to be fortified with economic rights, because if a society’s economy is weak, then everything within society will suffer. If citizens can’t feed themselves or don’t have access to medical care because the economy has collapsed, then all the best government programs and philosophies don’t mean much.”

Frank Stronach in National Post May 14, 2024 [but it is surely extraordinary that he does not know Magna Carta does enshrine economic rights including to property or that the U.S. Constitution does].