Recent stories of note:
“A. E. Housman”
Alexander Larman, The Critic
The poet and scholar A. E. Housman is one of those eminent Victorians oh so easy to caricature. Tom Stoppard, in his play The Invention of Love, portrays Housman as a “tweedy, desiccated figure who only comes to life when contemplating his beloved [Moses] Jackson,” as Alexander Larman writes. W. H. Auden, who wrote a sonnet about Housman, also depicts him as the dry “Latin Scholar of his generation,” singling out his “savage foot-notes on unjust editions.” It is true that Housman railed against scholars who use manuscripts “as drunkards use lamp-posts—not to light them on their way but to dissimulate their instability,” but that snobbery should not detract from his poetry, which contains much that is lyrical and heartbreaking, as in “Because I Liked You Better.” This literary brilliance, derisive wit, and repressed homosexuality beg a comparison with Oscar Wilde, to whom Housman sent a copy of A Shropshire Lad while Wilde was still languishing in prison for “gross indecency.” Although it is easy to get caught up in the Wilde mystique, spare a thought for Housman, who pursued the same form of aesthetic life that Wilde was always going on about.
“History lessons”
Philip Zelikow, The Times Literary Supplement
A Shropshire Lad is so captivating partly because it captures the beauty and innocence of an England still unscarred by the horrors of war. Indeed, the specter of 1914 looms so large in the Western imagination that it obscures subjects even weightier than poetry, such as contemporary geopolitics. Philip Zelikow, in his review of a recent book that analyzes U.S.–China tensions through the prism of the Great Power competition of the early twentieth century, argues that World War I analogies can be misleading. While there is a parallel to be drawn between Britain’s deliberately vague promises of aid to France and America’s strategic ambiguity towards Taiwan, General Secretary Xi is no Kaiser Wilhelm: the latter’s almost comically mercurial personality, which the historian Christopher Clark likened to a “Tourette’s tic at the heart of the German state executive,” is the exact opposite of the cold, calculated, and steely persona of the Chinese leader. Rather than trying to mix and match historical events and personalities, the broader lesson we should learn from the July Crisis is that disaster only becomes inevitable when policymakers are made to feel like they have no other choice but to go along with the preapproved plan.
“The West Distorted”
Sebastian Milbank, First Things
While book-length diatribes against Western civilization are a dime a dozen, few are written by academics with real-world influence—usually, a contradiction in terms. A rare counterexample is Amitav Acharya’s recent book, The Once and Future World Order, which comes highly praised by senior Western diplomats. In a bid to create his desired “multiplex” world order, Acharya, a professor of international relations at American University, pulls all the usual sleights of hand to cut the West down to size. Non-Western figures and civilizations—especially the author’s native India—are invariably cast as noble, inventive, and peace-loving, while Western developments are denigrated: Magna Carta is reduced to a “violent demand for property rights by the nobility,” and the idea that the Greeks invented democracy is characterized as a “Eurocentric belief.” Bizarrely, the book does not actually engage with non-Western ideas about the world order. Instead, as Sebastian Milbank writes, “by abstracting liberal, Western ideas from their origins and projecting them onto other cultures, Acharya obscures rather than reveals the contributions of non-Western civilization.”
