War, tragedy, espionage, euphemism, moral panic, and author events

Weekly digest, February 21, 2026

Novelist and screenwriter Eric Ambler (1909-98)

Apologies for a few weeks away. The lingering effects of our Christmas flu as well as the back-to-back weeks of bad winter weather, the stress of a new semester, and some poorly timed insomnia laid me low for a while. It was a rough couple of weeks. I’m not out of the woods but I’m much improved, thankfully.

With that in mind, the selections below are a bit haphazard—the flotsam of the shipwreck that has been January and February. These fragments I have shored, etc. Having finally assembled them, I think it’s a strong lineup of interesting reads, and I hope that will make up somewhat for almost a month of minimal Substacking.

Apropos

If entertainment means light and playful pleasure, then I think it is exactly what we ought to get from some literary work—say, from a trifle by Prior or Martial. If it means those things which ‘grip’ the reader of popular romance—suspense, excitement and so forth—then I would say that every book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less.

—CS Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

What’s going on

Of interest

Let me start with a bit of self-promotion: I’m grateful to announce that I’ll be participating in the Greenville Library’s Local Author Expo for the first time in a few years. The expo will be held Saturday, March 14 from 10:00-1:00 at the main library in downtown Greenville, South Carolina. If this is convenient to you or you live in the surrounding area and it sounds like a good time, I’d be glad to see you there.

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A few weeks ago at The Critic, Andy Owen published this solid long essay on spy fiction as a genre: its history, the bases of its appeal, some of its latest masters, and its intriguing parallels to the conspiracy theory:

More than creating a story that makes sense, both conspiracy theories and spy fiction provide comfort by assigning human agency to events beyond our control. It is better for our collective ego to believe our situation is of our own making rather than the result of a remorseless natural world or complex interactions we are unable to influence. If humans are responsible, it also suggests that humans can find a solution. The comfort provided is that there are those behind the chaotic scenes, conflicted and damned but ultimately morally good, countering the evils we see on our daily newsfeeds and even delivering justice to the fictitious proxies of faceless distant enemies.

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Peter C. Meilaender recently began a slow read-along through Malory. Given recent circumstances I’ve already fallen behind, but I aim to catch up and keep up. A worthwhile project.

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From the WSJ, a review of That Book is Dangerous: How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars are Remaking Publishing, which examines in painful detail “the self-organizing tyranny besetting the book world”:

Courage, in the author’s account, is scarce in a literary culture circumscribed by sanctimonious bullies and in thrall to identitarian grievance mongers. Again and again his terrified sources, after bemoaning the Orwellian climate of the book business, beg him for reassurance that they will not be named in print.

Mr. Szetela describes vicious (and semiliterate) pile-ons in response to imaginary transgressions, abject apologies akin to hostage statements and gleeful attacks on the apology until the victim has been shunned by publishers, editors and agents—and branded with a seemingly indelible digital scarlet letter. “Years later,” the author explains, “the first page of Google will continue to advertise their polluted moral status to the world.”

It’s daring even to write such a book. I hope it will make a difference.

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Here’s an item for fun: Ed West recently shared a link to a free online game called “When Was This War?” Players are presented with a number of battle narratives stripped of names and locations and must infer when the battle took place—the closer you are, the more points you get. Greatly enjoyable.

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At Law & Liberty, Miles Smith writes about the sense of tragedy marking Russell Kirk’s traditionalist conservatism:

The lack of a pronounced literary influence in American politics in the early twenty-first century probably accounts on some level for the lack of a sense of tragedy among the right-leaning populace, but the lack of a tragic sense also comes from a misreading of American political history. Few, if any, American statesmen believed they lived in golden ages. More often than not, they feared the failure of the American experiment and the potential tragedy of the American republic.

The Founding Era, so often presented as a glorious near-utopia created from the mud and muck of the War for American Independence, left the creators of the American republic profoundly disheartened. In the aftermath of the Federalist Era, the Founders who survived—Adams, Jefferson, and Madison among them—feared that the American republic was falling into democratic anarchy or, in the case of the Jackson presidency, Caesarism.

Smith considers what the lack of a sense of the tragic means for latter-day right-wingers. He doesn’t quote Thomas Sowell, but this Sowell insight (from Intellectuals and Society) came inevitably to mind: “Without some sense of the tragedy of the human condition, it is all too easy to consider anything that goes wrong as being somebody’s fault.”

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Theodore Dalrymple rightly points out that “neutralized,” in the sense of “the suspect was neutralized by the police,” is a euphemism: “We ought not to indulge in semantic dehumanisation of the kind that totalitarian regimes indulge in.”

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Finally, also from The Critic a few weeks ago but well worth hanging onto, here’s a moving sympathetic portrait of the internet-famous botched restoration Monkey Christ, the work of an elderly Spanish lady who died late last year:

I said Cecilia Giménez had created one of the most famous paintings of the 21st Century, but that is a low bar. Other than Banksy’s middlebrow murals, famous paintings aren’t really a thing anymore. Cultured Parisians in 1865 could intelligently debate the merits of Manet’s Olympia or Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1916 but there’s really nothing to say about Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild except that it sold for £24.5 million in 2021. Gallerists and auction houses have responded to the Death of the Author by selling artists rather than art, brands rather than paintings. You may know Ai Weiwei is a famous artist and could you recognise any of his work without a label? Be honest. This commodification suits the very limited audience for blue-chip contemporary art. The rest of us cannot laugh at its pretensions as easily as we can at a silly old lady from Spain.

Worth your while.

The latest on the blog

• After a couple weeks of total inactivity, I resumed writing with a meditation on the homely and entirely appropriate Appalachian expression “worn slap out.”

• I got myself limbered up a bit with a brief review of Geoffrey Household’s brisk postwar page-turner A Rough Shoot.

• I announced my participation in the Greenville Library’s annual Local Author Expo (see above).

• After learning that a former department head at a school where I’ve taught adjunct classes off and on for a decade had died, I reflected gratefully on her role as boss and considered other good bosses I’ve had.

From the blog archives

• A couple years ago I wondered what was in the water back in the 1940s and 50s, when week after week small masterpieces of genre fiction appeared.

• Around the same time, I tried to get into writing—not entirely successfully, I think—some of what I think makes Dr Strangelove still work as a critique of technocracy and technique.

• I also chronicled a childhood shaped by John Bunyan, my years away from his work, and my return as an adult.

Currently reading

• State of Siege, by Eric Ambler

• Orthodoxy, by GK Chesterton

• The Way of Dante: Going Through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven with CS Lewis, Dorothy L Sayers, and Charles Williams, by Richard Hughes Gibson

• Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans

• King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, by Roger Lancelyn Green

Recently acquired

• The Spy, by James Fenimore Cooper

• The Old Vengeful, by Anthony Price

• Selected Poems, by Robinson Jeffers

• Benito Mussolini: The First Fascist, by Anthony L Cardoza

• The Quiller Memorandum, by Adam Hall

• The Way of Dante, by Richard Hughes Gibson

• Themistocles: The Rise and Fall of Athens’s Naval Mastermind, by Michael Scott

• Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, by Gerald Posner

• The York Patrol: The Real Story of Alvin York and the Unsung Heroes Who Made Him World War I’s Most Famous Soldier, by James Carl Nelson

Until next time

Thanks for reading!