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Articles in reverse chronological order
(Copyright rests with the original publishers, unless otherwise indicated)
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- "Book Review [untitled]" (National Observer, Spring 2007): Mostly eulogistic notice of Andrew Keen's much maligned book The Cult of the Amateur, which has some particularly acerbic and valuable things to say about blogging mania, cyberporn, and other modern horrors. A republication of this piece, under the title "The Perils of Cyberspace", can be found here.
- "Getting It Right At Last" (Oriens, May 2007): A brief survey of the recent Vatican decision to insist on the correct translation, in the Mass, of pro multis as "for many" rather than the depressingly frequent and inaccurate "for all".
- "Backpedalling" (The New Criterion, September 2006): Two eminent (and, sad to report, mutually antagonistic) American organists remembered: E. Power Biggs and Virgil Fox.
- "Acoustic Feedback" (The American Conservative, July 31, 2006): A (justifiably) rave review of Robert Philip's Performing Music in the Age of Recording.
- "Choirs and Traditional Catholicism: A Few Thoughts" (The Remnant, July 31, 2006): What can happen when lunatic-fringe elements infiltrate a traditional Latin Mass choir. From one who knows.
- "Wizards of Oz" (The American Conservative, June 5, 2006): Round-up, more in the proverbial sorrow than in anger, of Australia's mainstream intellectual life and how it has grown dramatically worse since 1990: indeed even since 2005. In America, so comprehensive an indictment would spark genuine debate. In Australia, those indicted (and in practice it remains irrelevant whether they call themselves leftists or "conservatives") merely do afresh what they invariably do best: ignore it, hoping it will go away.
- "Rhapsody on a Theme of Rachmaninoff" (The American Conservative, April 10, 2006): Not my choice of title: I originally named the piece "To Russia With Love". Whatever the review is called, it's a discussion of Max Harrison's very impressive new Rachmaninoff biography.
- "Authoritarian Personalities" (The American Conservative, February 27, 2006): Again, the given title is not my own: I called my original article "Klemp, Ya Talka Too Much!" (the article itself will explain why). Still, otherwise the piece is very much as I wrote it.
- "Steel-White Logic: Dryden in His Time and Ours" (Annals Australasia, January-February 2006): Encomium to my favourite poet.
- "The Pen and the Cross" (The American Conservative, January 30, 2006): Review of Joseph Pearce's Literary Giants, Literary Catholics.
- "The Shakespeare of Music" (The American Conservative, January 16, 2006): Review of Edmund Morris's Beethoven: The Universal Composer, which I wasn't expecting to like at all, yet ended up relishing.
- "The Bullets Are Working" (The American Conservative, November 7, 2005): Article concerning William the Silent's murder in 1584.
- "Saëns and Sensibilité" (The New Criterion, October 2005): The newly-translated correspondence (1862-1920) between Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré discussed here.
- "Casualties of Waugh" (The American Conservative, September 26, 2005): Waugh's nonfiction deserves to be at least as well known as his fiction. This piece attempts to explain why.
- "The Cat-and-Mouse Queen" (The American Conservative, September 12, 2005): Baffling to her contemporaries, baffling today, Queen Christina of Sweden has been done full justice in a new account, by Veronica Buckley, of her strange career.
- "Bland Rube Triumphant" (Chronicles, September 2005): An obituary of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Queensland's Premier from 1968 to 1987. He died in April 2005. I miss him still.
- "The Day The Music Didn't Die" (The American Conservative, July 4, 2005): Joseph Horowitz's mercilessly neo-Adornian diatribe Classical Music in America dissected.
- "Finale in the Bunker" (News Weekly, June 4, 2005): Review of the breathtaking movie Downfall, starring Bruno Ganz.
- "Benedict XV's Quest for Peace" (Oriens, Winter 2005): An introduction to Pope Benedict XV (reigned 1914-22) and his valiant yet unsuccessful attempts to broker a compromise peace from World War I's very start. Bibliographic note: a different version of this article appeared in the June 2005 AD2000, much cut and rewritten (also retitled) by that magazine's editor.
- "Goodbye to All That: Keith Windschuttle on White Australia" (National Observer, Autumn 2005): An analysis, mostly favourable, of Windschuttle's book The White Australia Policy. Something very odd has happened to the formatting of this webpage, notably to the footnotes, but it can still be read easily enough.
- "Background Noise" (The American Conservative, April 11, 2005): Review of Michael Steen's sometimes brilliant, rather often frustrating The Lives and Times of the Great Composers.
- "1.5m Dead Armenians (But Don't Tell the EU)" (News Weekly, February 26, 2005): In memoriam the 1.5 million Armenian victims who perished at Turkish hands in the World War I genocide. Who speaks for them? Certainly not our own ruling class, for whom exterminating Christians is absolutely OK.
- "A Muse of Fire" (The American Conservative, February 14, 2005): Having been an unapologetic (though obviously imperfect) Wagnerite from childhood onwards, I was glad The American Conservative gave me the opportunity to dilate upon this maddening, sometimes terrifying, always fascinating figure. How sorry I feel for those who allow specious ideological considerations to deter them from exploring Wagner's best music themselves.
- "Quality French Film Wins Following" (News Weekly, February 12, 2005): Review of the French movie Les Choristes.
- "Putin, Communism, and Santamaria's Hopes for Russia" (News Weekly, January 29, 2005): Discussion of Putin's neo-Bolshevism.
- "Salò Saga" (The American Conservative, November 8, 2004): Mussolini-related literature in English seems to be appearing in spate now, after years when it was a drug on the market. Here's a discussion of a predominantly worthwhile book on Mussolini's last 600 days, though Nicholas Farrell's broader life of the Duce (see below) surpasses it in most respects.
- "A Jolting, Two-Hour Masterpiece" (News Weekly, September 11, 2004): Review of the Brazilian documentary Bus 174.
- "Puppet-Master Extraordinaire" (News Weekly, August 14, 2004): Review of Sean McMeekin's The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow's Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West, 1917-1940. (NW reproduced the piece with permission from The American Conservative, where it appeared under the title "Slick Willi" on June 21, 2004; NW slightly changed a few passages from the American original, in addition to giving it a new name. Such info as this is supplied to aid the hapless graduate student from the University of Nebraska who might one day be tempted to make my bibliography the subject of his doctoral thesis.)
- "Curtains on Camelot" (News Weekly, July 17, 2004): Demythologising the Kennedy family, for the 10,423,679th time. There is always some dropkick who has never read this information before and writes outraged letters to the editor about it.
- "Bulletins from Barchester Towers" (Organo Pleno, Melbourne, Winter 2004): A tribute to one Marmaduke Conway, who lived in the early-to-mid-20th century and whose prose evokes Trollopian milieux long since gone.
- "Saint Alger's Botox" (The American Conservative, May 10, 2004): Review of what is surely the definitive demolition job upon that Stalinist sleaze, Alger Hiss. A slightly shorter version of the same article was reproduced here.
- "The Last Samurai Goes To Hollywood (And Is Done Justice, Sort Of)" (LewRockwell.com, April 21, 2004): Review of The Last Samurai, correcting an error which appeared in the News Weekly version of the same article.
- "Shattered Glass" (News Weekly, March 27, 2004): Review of the eponymous movie.
- "Taboos Decay in Australia" (VDARE, March 13, 2004): Two decades on: the 1984 beginning of the New Class' war against great Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey. It's tempting to date the start of modern Australian history from this odious campaign. Fortunately Blainey was undeterred by The Treatment, being an intellectual and a man of honour.
- "The Folds of the Monarchy" (News Weekly, January 31, 2004): Bagehot-echoing title for a comment upon the House of Windsor's 20th-century history.
- "Book Review [untitled]" (National Observer, Autumn 2004): Review of Nicholas Farrell's Mussolini: A New Life.
- "What’s Going On?" (The American Conservative, January 19, 2004): A visit to Detroit's bodacious Motown Museum (the article's original title was therefore "Dancing in the Museum"). See if you can spot the factual error I made in this piece (clue: it involves Smokey Robinson. Neither I nor the editorial staff detected my mistake before it went to press!).
- "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (The American Conservative, December 15, 2003): Encomium (with reservations) to Dwight Macdonald, one of the funniest and most erudite American journalists of the Cold War era.
- "Australia’s Hanson: She's Back!" (VDARE, November 11, 2003): A preliminary report on the freeing of Pauline Hanson from the prison cell she should never have had to occupy in the first place.
- "Sculpture With Effervescence" (Coast & Country, Summer 2003-04): A rare venture by me (Southern Hemisphere summer) into arts reportage: a rather attractive exhibition of sculpture in the Melbourne suburb of Frankston.
- "From Pink To Blue: The Mainstreaming of Homosexuality" (National Observer, Spring 2003): Southern-Hemisphere spring, naturellement; this explains the fact that this was published after, not before, the same magazine's Summer 2003 issue (see "Brazil Turns Left" below).
- "Book Review [untitled]" (National Observer, Spring 2003): Article (the only one, it would seem, published in Australia) on Peter Brimelow's The Worm in the Apple.
- "Pauline Hanson: Political Prisoner" (VDARE, August 25, 2003): History in the raw: comments, for a mostly American audience, on the imprisonment of Pauline Hanson. Were I to rewrite this piece nowadays, I would probably make it less shrill in tone. But hey, what any halfway literate Australian acknowledged at the time was: first they came for Pauline Hanson, and I never spoke out, because I was not Pauline Hanson. Then they came for ... well, finish the Martin Niemöller quote for yourself.
- "Joe Bananas" (The American Conservative, July 14, 2003): Article on the last paranoid years of Stalin.
- "Death in the Temple" (Quadrant, June 2003): Enthusiastic review of The Lost King of France, Deborah Cadbury's fascinating study of poor "Louis XVII" and those who purported to be that monarch during the early 19th century.
- "Montezuma's Revenge: Mexico, the United States, and Demography" (National Observer, Winter 2003): A survey of El Presidente Fox and his stranglehold upon American immigration policy. This article contains one mistake not spotted in time for correcting on the original proofs: Wilmot Robertson, the writer referred to here as "the late", was in 2003 still living. (He died in 2005.)
- "Book Review [untitled]" (National Observer, Winter 2003): Predominantly enthusiastic review of Anne B. Hendershott's The Politics of Deviance.
- "President Vicente Fox and Mexico's Demographic Threat" (News Weekly, May 31, 2003): Brief account of the illegal-immigration mania which now determines the US Government's obeisance towards Mexico, and which did this well before Dubya's babbling about the need for an "amnesty". (See also "Montezuma's Revenge", above.)
- "Take My Guns, Please" (Chronicles, March 2003): Given the impossibility of prevailing on the average Australian "conservative" to say anything bad about the Servile State's gun-confiscation, I find it reassuring that this article seemed to have a particular appeal (if my correspondence is any guide) to American readers. It was, of course, published in America. Oddly, I still get nice E-mails about it.
- "Why Belloc Still Matters" (The American Conservative, January 13, 2003): Profile of Belloc, marking the 50th anniversary of his death. A very slightly different version of this same article appeared here.
- "Brazil Turns Left: Executive Power in Latin America's Largest Country" (National Observer, Summer 2003): A once-over-lightly, although footnoted, account of Brazilian presidential politics over recent decades.
- "The Best of Enemies" (The Sydney Morning Herald, April 13, 2002): A feature commissioned by the SMH to tie in with the first Australian publication of The Unsleeping Eye. While most of this piece merely replicates what is in the book, some additional material does crop up.
- "Almanach de Wagga" (Quadrant, October 2002): It's my belief that once you acquire an interest in the Tichborne Case, no power on earth can quench this interest, and it becomes a raging addiction, albeit of a harmless kind. This is what I wrote in Quadrant about the affair; I retain a sneaking fondness for the title's appalling pun.
- "Roar of the Greasepaint" (The New Criterion, September 2001): A salute to Roger Flury's long-overdue book on Mascagni and his music.
- "The Habsburg Achievement: Lessons for the World" (Speech given to the Kingsford [New South Wales] Branch of No Republic on May 24, 1996): One can never predict what will catch the public's fancy and what won't. This speech seems to have stuck in the brain cells of monarchists around the world, so scores a link on my site by the proverbial "popular demand". My only reason for not linking to it earlier is that, since my main priority has been supplying links to my 21st-century material, 1990s documents needed for the most part to go upon my back-burner. Note that the original link for this article died some time in 2005; this is a link provided via America's Free Republic, which means all the footnotes got left out, alas. (The original source's misspellings, per contra, survive.) If you want footnotes sent to you, I should be able to rustle them up.
- "Hail, César" (National Review, December 3, 1990): For the present site's purposes, this American publication is my Opus 1. The César of the title is César Franck. Note that somehow in the typesetting process, "Piano Quintet" became "Piano Quartet". In the pre-Internet (and de facto pre-diskette) age, an author was entirely at the mercy of his typesetter to get such things right.
© R. J. Stove, unless otherwise shown
Photo of R. J. Stove © John D. Styles, 2004
Site last updated on November 16, 2006
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