Saturday Links

Charles Dickens’s other Christmas stories, mysticism, revisiting Jean-Luc Godard’s “Hail Mary,” remarriage in the early church, and more.

Source: IMDB

Good morning from Victoria, British Columbia, where my wife and I are visiting my daughter and her family for the holidays. Today’s email will be followed by one on Monday, then I will take a short break for Christmas before returning on Wednesday, January 1st.

There are a number of worthwhile articles in the latest issue of The New Criterion—Mark Bauerlein on Dana Gioia’s Poetry as Enchantment, the poet Richard Tillinghast on the life and work of Andrew Lytle, and Joshua Katz on a new translation of Aesop’s fables, among others. But let me highlight Gary Saul Morson’s review of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s The Last Tsar:

What’s so bad about having a mentally deficient ruler? Surely the ruler’s advisors can make wise decisions and tell him what to say? When I hear such reasoning, I think of Tsar Nicholas II, his sad demise, and, after the pitiful end of the three-hundred-year Romanov dynasty, Russia’s descent into civil war followed by seventy years of brutal Bolshevik rule.

Historians have often treated these events as the inevitable result of Russia’s antiquated system of government in a rapidly modernizing age. But as Tsuyoshi Hasegawa stresses in his new study of Nicholas’s abdication, The Last Tsar, nothing could be further from the truth. Wise, or even mediocre, leadership could have preserved the monarchy and saved Russia from the disasters following its collapse. Unfortunately, Nicholas and Alexandra repeatedly made the worst possible decisions.

The brilliant brief life of the Duke of Buckingham: “Buckingham defied the odds – perhaps thanks to his long and shapely legs – by successfully straddling the reigns of James and his son Charles I. For more than a decade, he was the most powerful man in England next to the king. While some described him as a ‘rising star’, others reached for the more ominous image of a comet, ‘drawn out of the dross of the earth’ and a harbinger of disorder. Surprisingly, there hasn’t been a full-length biography since Roger Lockyer’s in 1981, but the 400th anniversary of James I’s death next year has given Hughes-Hallett her opportunity. At more than six hundred pages, The Scapegoat is long, but Buckingham’s rise and fall is told in a succession of short, vivid chapters. The style is relaxed, sometimes playful. It is a book, Hughes-Hallett says, about big things, such as ‘peace and war’, and smaller things – ‘babies, jewels, anemones’. It moves from the complex power struggles and religious conflicts riddling Europe to the domestic details of the Stuart court and the ‘web of love stories’ being spun there. The effect is to locate Buckingham, who at the end of his life could be described as ‘the greatest and most remarkable favourite’, firmly in his material and emotional worlds.”