Willy Wonka in Narnia

Those of us who value The Narnia Chronicles have already read enough to be dubious about Netflix's upcoming 2027 version of The Magician's Nephew. It is entirely unnecessary to be a Christian believer to entertain that doubt. The production appears to have made many bad decisions, quite apart from messing with Aslan's gender. From The Telegraph, by someone obviously familiar with the books:

Uncle Andrew and Jadis

As anyone who has read the book will know, the Edwardian setting is crucial to its tone – self-consciously setting it before the First World War at a time England is still innocent and the horrors of the Somme have yet to rise out of some great hellish pit.

That prelapsarian quality is key to the story, which is essentially the origin tale of Professor Digory Kirke, the eccentric owner of the wardrobe which grants access to Narnia in later books. The Magician’s Nephew is in its essence a book set Before The Fall. At the start of the story, the wicked Jadis is trapped in suspended animation in a post-apocalyptic alternative dimension, Narnia has yet to be created by Aslan and Britain is looking forward to a century of peace. But then two children – Digory and his friend Polly – muddle around and everything changes utterly. Jadis is unleashed, evil is free and tranquility is shattered – literally so, when the future ruler of Narnia runs amok in London in scenes that have the quality of a steampunk Grand Theft Auto.

That is in contrast to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which unfolds against the background of the Blitz and where readers can infer that the children are quietly traumatised by the horror of war – one reason why they leap so readily into the great unknown of the wardrobe. But if you shunt The Magician’s Nephew forward to the post-war austerity of the 1950s, then that dynamic is changed utterly: the calm-before-the-storm aspect of the Edwardian period is missing.

If Jadis is the monster in this story, then the part of pathetic villain is played by Digory’s eccentric Uncle Andrew, a self-involved boffin who tricks Polly into disappearing into another dimension by having her touch a magic ring – then blackmails Digory into setting off to rescue her. The “Magician” in The Magician’s Nephew, as written by Lewis, has few redeeming features. Yet in Gerwig’s film he’s played by the charming Daniel Craig; judging by new images, he will be a lovable boffin, a sort of Willy Wonka of the Lewis-verse. .... (more)

Ed Power, "Netflix’s $280m ‘rock opera’ Narnia film is even madder than it sounds," The Telegraph, Sept. 20, 2026.

The most oppressive tyranny

When "omnipotent moral busybodies" control power:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

C.S. Lewis, "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment," God in the Dock, Eerdmans, 1970.

“I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first”

Last night a friend and I re-watched A Man for All Seasons (1966). It's a great film with important lessons, whether or not its portrayal of Thomas More accurately reflects the real man. Today I read a review of Studies in Machiavellian Political Philosophy by Michael Anton. The reviewer doesn't agree with Anton's strategy for reversing Machiavelli's influence on modernity and contrasts it with More's principles. Choose More, not Machiavelli:

Anton argues not only that the Italian presaged post-religious modernity, but that his ideas, especially in their cynical, adversarial relationship to Christianity, are vital to understanding our contemporary sociopolitical distemper.

“Machiavelli intimates that Christianity’s promises are worse than false,” writes Anton. “Those fooled by Christianity do not receive what they are promised and end up worse off than when they started.” The Christian faith, the Italian believed, engenders weakness by persuading men to rely not on themselves but on outside forces.

Moreover, Machiavelli sees Christianity as deceiving the masses into believing that they can attain a transcendent peace and personal success that the ancients believed was reserved only for a glorious few. Anton explains:

Worst of all, Christianity promises all believers a serenity of mind or superiority to fortune that classical philosophers considered the possession of only the best of men, acquired through much effort.... Christianity attempts to make a simplified version of this state of mind available to all, arguably without any effort. After all, how hard is it to die when you are promised an eternity in Paradise?

For Machiavelli, this simplification not only dilutes “true” philosophy, but strips it of its potency, sophistication, and nobility. Christianity makes men complacent, resigned to a humble life, disinterested in human glory. It promotes “ambitious idleness” (Machiavelli’s words), in which men do little more than pray. And, in a “pious cruelty,” it tyrannizes people into belief via threat of eternal damnation. ....

Thomas More, perhaps Machiavelli’s greatest humanist contemporary, offers an illuminating foil. More also penned an influential treatise in the early sixteenth century, Utopia, which, while critiquing a corrupted Christendom, also provoked much debate, given that many of his suggestions—such as easy divorce, euthanasia, and married priests—contradicted the Catholic teaching he held dear (and, indeed, died for). Regardless of whether Utopia is a satire of humanist political theorizing, More is antithetical to Machiavelli....

More’s is the nobler path. Men may recognize the this-worldly success of the statesman who schemes and exploits to achieve his ambitions, but he is typically hated rather than loved, his glories tarred by a destructive legacy. More’s light still shines bright, however: Not only was he principled and courageous, but he was also prudent, performing his state duties, honoring his king, and selling his property to provide for his family. His declaration from the scaffold in 1535 continues to inspire: “I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”

Modeling Machiavelli may achieve political objectives that are (ironically) anti-Machiavellian. Doing so, however, risks further undermining whatever virtue remains in contemporary public service. And if we are concerned about the welfare not only of the polis but of our souls, More is our man. (more)

Casey Chalk, "Unmaking Machiavelli’s Modernity," First Things, Sept. 4, 2026.

Ordinary evangelicals

Many of us who have long identified as evangelicals now avoid the label because it has become understood as a political, i.e., Trumpian, rather than a theological stance. "The Monstering of Evangelicalism," by Bonnie Kristian, an editor at Christianity Today, argues that the "monstering" of evangelicals is unfair to most of them:

.... Then came Trump. Like many educated evangelicals, especially in the media, I was immediately put off by him at every level: morally, theologically, politically, aesthetically. I never considered voting for Hillary Clinton (or, later, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris), but I was dismayed at Trump’s clumsy pandering to evangelical voters and even more dismayed when it worked. That year and in the years to come, I wrote often about Trump and evangelicals, thinking through how it could be that we were so linked to him in the public mind.

I’m still dismayed, to be honest. Though I’ve come to hold that dismay in tension with the reality that many evangelicals have defensible, understandable reasons for their Trump votes, this isn’t a story about how I learned to stop worrying and love the Donald. ....

...[C]riticism of evangelicals has undeniably intensified since around 2015, during a decade when the rise of Trump coincided with the exvangelical phenomenon, including widespread public renunciations of evangelicalism; with rapid changes in American norms and laws around sex and gender; with a string of high-profile evangelical scandals; and with rising ignorance of religion in general. ....

Like any movement on this scale, evangelicalism has its freaks and fringes. There are any number of prominent figures, people with big churches (or at least big beards and big podcasts) with downright abhorrent beliefs and behavior. It’s not hard to find these folks, nor is it wrong to want to avoid any association with them.

I’m not talking about them, though. I’m talking about the millions of people who make up ordinary American evangelicalism, people who are overwhelmingly kind and faithful, with normal (which is to say: low) levels of political engagement and expertise. They don’t want their church or their identity to be focused on politics; they want both to be focused on Christ.

They’re sincerely trying to bring their faith to bear in a fast-moving, polarized, two-party system with no good options. It doesn’t always go so well. But they are trying to follow Jesus, and they are trying to do the right thing. They do not merit contempt. (more)

Bonnie Kristian, "The Monstering of Evangelicalism," First Things, Sept 2, 2026.

"Every Man a King"

Some years ago I bought and read T. Harry Williams' biography, Huey Long (1969). It's a long, thorough, and very readable book about the politician who, if he had not been assassinated, probably would have run against FDR for the Democratic nomination for President in 1936. Long was a populist, governor, and then Senator from Louisiana, creator of a political machine that dominated Louisiana politics for decades. He was corrupt, authoritarian, and very popular in his state. Robert Penn Warren's novel, All the King's Men (1946), was a fictional account of Long's rise to power. I would be very concerned about any political candidate who viewed Long favorably. In the WSJ today:

JD Vance has a new populist muse. Speaking at an Ohio steel plant on Aug. 21, he appealed to Huey Long, Louisiana’s Democratic governor from 1928-32. Long, Mr. Vance said, pursued a policy agenda to make “every man a king.” While the vice president connected this phrase to the importance of public safety, it also seems to reflect his own broader political vision. As a Louisianan, I can attest that every American should be wary of the impossible promises of Long-style populism.

In the Pelican State, we’ve been dealing with consequences of Long’s agenda for nearly a century. Despite his rhetorical promise to make kings of the people, the politician nicknamed “Kingfish” cemented the state government’s king-like power. ....

In his Ohio speech, Mr. Vance at least acknowledged that Long was “kind of a crazy guy.” But the same can be said of Long’s policy agenda, which is quite similar to the populist vision of politicians like J.D. Vance. Long’s genius was persuading people that concentrating power in his hands was the same as empowering them. A century later, Louisiana is still paying the bill for that con. .... (more)

I posted about Long once before here. Years ago, at our church conference, I had a chance to talk with Senator Jennings Randolph (WVa), who had served a couple of years in Congress when Long was a Senator. As I recall, his recollections—Jennings was a great storyteller—were mostly about Long's flamboyant attire—he mentioned ties—and speaking style. A few years ago, my brother and I visited the Capitol building in Baton Rouge that Long had built, and where he was killed. A statue of Huey Long rises above his grave in front of the building. While there, we were approached by a Louisiana couple who continued to admire Long for what he had done for the state.

Daniel Erspamer, "From a Hillbilly to a King," The Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2026.

Alienation

Anyone who has visited my apartment would suspect that I am something of an Anglophile. They would be right. On the walls, they would find pictures of village scenes, a map of the London Underground, reproduction posters for RMS Aquitania and the Night Scotsman, a mirror from a pub, and more. Someone reading my bookshelves will find many mysteries and thrillers by British authors, from Buchan to Sayers, Allingham, P.D. James, Dick Francis, Conan Doyle, Frederick Forsyth, and John le Carré, among others. Other favorite authors include Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Bernard Cornwell, Churchill, George MacDonald Fraser (Flashman), P.G. Wodehouse, Richard Adams (Watership Down), A.A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, Robert Louis Stevenson. I enjoy reading British history and watching documentaries about it. Much of my favorite music is British: Ralph Vaughan Williams, The Scottish Psalter, Anglican hymns, hymns written by Charles Wesley. I listen often to The Rolling Stones and Van Morrison. I like English-style beers, Scotch whisky, bangers and mash, fish and chips, etc. And that's not exhaustive. I am an Anglophile, but mostly, I think, of a Britain past rather than the one since, maybe, the 1990s, when I was last there. Carl Trueman, who grew up in England, writes "The England I Knew Is Gone":

Leslie Poles Hartley famously dubbed the past “a foreign country.” This summer, for the first time, I sensed that the present can be one too. My annual visit to the land of my childhood and youth exposed me to a culture very different from the one that nurtured me. Growing up as a grammar schoolboy in 1970s and ’80s England, I absorbed the importance of personal restraint; emotional self-control in public; privacy; acting with honesty and fairness, even to one’s own hurt; and respecting others regardless of their social status or opinions. At the level of society, such personal values promoted freedoms—of speech, of religion, of expression. All of that is gone, at least from the class that presumes to define the country’s mores and morals. ....

England exemplifies the political shape a country takes when expressive individualism grips the imagination of its ruling class. It is impossible for any culture to allow everyone to be who they want to be, from transgender activists to traditional Christians. Somebody therefore has to bring order to the potential chaos, and as expressive individualism tends strongly toward the transgressive, with its core notion that personal authenticity lies in breaking with the herd (that is, the social expectations of the past), the culture-makers will typically favor those who want to demolish received ideas and traditions deemed stumbling blocks to self-realization. This turns morality on its head. Yesterday’s virtues have become today’s oppressive vices, as the moral register has shifted in a psychological direction—most notably in the trivialization of trauma, which in some cases has come to mean little more than “somebody somewhere said something hurtful about me.” Sadly, the Church has often proved little different. ....

And this is not an English monopoly. It is a Western malaise. .... (more)

Carl R. Trueman, "The England I Knew Is Gone," First Things, August 27, 2026.

"He almost deserved it"

I am making slow but regular progress through The Chronicles of Narnia and have just begun reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eustace Clarence Scrubb, a cousin of the Pevensies, is introduced in this book. I enjoyed Lewis's description in the first chapter:

THERE was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence and his schoolmasters called him Scrubb. I can't tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none. He didn't call his father and mother "Father" and "Mother," but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotalers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.

Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

Eustace Clarence disliked his cousins, the four Pevensies—Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. But he was quite glad when he heard that Edmund and Lucy were corning to stay. For deep down inside he liked bossing and bullying; and, though he was a puny little person who couldn't have stood up even to Lucy, let alone Edmund, in a fight, he knew that there are dozens of ways to give people a bad time if you are in your own home and they are only visitors. ....

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 1952.

"Thus the modern practice of genocide was born"

If you wish to understand the 20^th century, you could do much worse than start with Paul Johnson's Modern Times (revised edition, 2001). I discovered today that the full text is available online in a variety of formats, but the physical book is worth owning. The following is from the second chapter, which deals mostly with the regimes Lenin and Mussolini created. The "Cheka" referred to below was Lenin's secret police, leading to various successors: MVD, OGPU, NKVD, KGB, Putin's Federal Security Service. Putin himself was trained by, and rose through, the KGB.

In the first six months of 1918 the Cheka executed, according to its official figures, only twenty-two prisoners. In the second half of the year it carried out 6,000 executions, and in the whole of 1919 some 10,000. W.H. Chamberlain, the first historian of the revolution, who was an eyewitness, calculated that by the end of 1920 the Cheka had carried out over 50,000 death sentences.

However, the most disturbing and, from the historical point of view, important characteristic of the Lenin terror was not the quantity of the victims but the principle on which they were selected. Within a few months of seizing power, Lenin had abandoned the notion of individual guilt and, with it, the whole Judeo-Christian ethic of personal responsibility. He was ceasing to be interested in what a man did or had done — let alone why he had done it — and was first encouraging, then commanding, his repressive apparatus to hunt down people, and destroy them, not on the basis of crimes, real or imaginary, but on the basis of generalizations, hearsay.... The watershed was Lenin's decree of January 1918 calling on the agencies of the state to 'purge the Russian land of all kinds of harmful insects'. This was not a judicial act: it was an invitation to mass murder. Many years later, Alexander Solzhenitsyn listed just a few of the groups who thus found themselves condemned to destruction as 'insects'. They included 'former Zemstvo members, people in the Coop[erative] movements, homeowners, high-school teachers, parish councils and choirs, priests, monks and nuns, Tolstoyan pacifists, officials of trade unions' — soon all to be classified as 'former people'. Quite quickly the condemned group decree-laws extended to whole classes and the notion of killing people collectively rather than individually was seized upon by the Cheka professionals with enthusiasm. Probably the most important Cheka official next to Dzerzhinsky himself was the ferocious Latvian M.Y. Latsis. He came nearest to giving the Lenin terror its true definition:

The Extraordinary Commission is neither an investigating commission nor a tribunal. It is an organ of struggle, acting on the home front of a civil war. It does not judge the enemy: it strikes him.... We are not carrying out war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. We are not looking for evidence or witnesses to reveal deeds or words against the Soviet power. The first question we ask is — to what class does he belong, what are his origins, upbringing, education or profession? These questions define the fate of the accused. This is the essence of the Red Terror.

Once Lenin had abolished the idea of personal guilt, and had started to 'exterminate' (a word he frequently employed) whole classes, merely on account of occupation or parentage, there was no limit to which this deadly principle might be carried. Might not entire categories of people be classified as 'enemies' and condemned to imprisonment or slaughter merely on account of the colour of their skin, or their racial origins or, indeed, their nationality? There is no essential moral difference between class-warfare and race-warfare, between destroying a class and destroying a race. Thus the modern practice of genocide was born. ....

Paul Johnson, Chapter 2 "The First Despotic Utopias," Modern Times, 2001.

Storytelling

Last year I posted about two books I wanted to read that were to be published in 2026. One of them, Michael Dirda's The Great Age of Storytelling: The Glory Days of Adventurers and Rogues, Time Travelers and Great Detectives, is now for sale at Amazon, although the expected publication date isn't until December. From Dirda's description of the contents:

In it, I reintroduce many influential, if now too seldom read, classics of adventure, mystery, horror and romance. Some of my favorites include the three ornately written mysteries in M.P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski, Richard Marsh’s astonishingly transgressive horror novel, The Beetle, J.M. Barrie’s multiverse play, Dear Brutus, and a shelf of swashbucklers such as Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood, Emmuska Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel and P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste, as well as E.F. Benson’s “spook stories” and Saki’s sardonic Beasts and Super Beasts. There are also long essays on Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, Edith Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, P.G. Wodehouse, John Buchan and Algernon Blackwood, among others.

I'm particularly interested in what Dirda says about the authors listed in the last sentence above.

Michael Dirda, "Disillusioned by politics, I read these books to get out of my slump," The Washington Post, May 9, 2025

Master of suspense

Those who follow this blog know that one of my favorite authors is John Buchan (1875-1940). I have posted about him, his thrillers, and other writings many times. Last evening I came across this BBC documentary, "John Buchan Master of Suspense," from 2007. If you've read Buchan at all, you will find it interesting. If you haven't, ignoring my recommendations, you may find it encourages you to give him a chance. It is quite good, primarily about his thrillers featuring Richard Hannay, the first of which was The 39 Steps, as well as the author's biography.

Ann Widdecombe, one of the commenters, was the former Conservative parliamentarian who was brutally murdered by a suspected terrorist this summer.

"John Buchan Master of Suspense," BBC, 2007.

Surrendering judgement

Gary Saul Morson, on a consequence of short (or no) historical memory:

A zombie is haunting America, the zombie of communism. Pronounced dead and discredited after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is back. ....

...I cannot help wondering: How is this possible? Do these people really have no problem with the history of the ideology they’re claiming? With Joseph Stalin’s Gulag that took the lives of millions, his artificially induced famine that deliberately starved several million peasants, and the secret police’s form of interrogation that routinely included torture? Do they actually want to revive Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror that claimed the lives of a quarter of Cambodia’s population?

Three quarters of a century ago, questions like these led to one of the most important volumes to emerge during the Cold War. Now largely forgotten, The God That Failed (1949) was once so widely read that the volume’s title became a catchphrase for any movement that attracted intellectuals to a quasi-religious ideology claiming infallibility.

The God That Failed brought together several prominent European and American writers who had once either been members of the Communist Party or sympathetic to the Soviet Union, but had eventually grown disillusioned. Each writer explained what initially attracted him to, and what eventually repelled him from, communism. The star-studded cast included Arthur Koestler, an Hungarian-born British writer now best known for his brilliant novel about communism, Darkness at Noon; French novelist André Gide; the Italian Ignazio Silone, author of Bread and Wine; British poet Stephen Spender; and two Americans, journalist and author Louis Fischer, and African American writer Richard Wright. ....

The supreme virtue of the Soviet Union was called partiinost (partyness). Partyness begins with the readiness to give up one’s own judgment—not only about politics but also about people, including one’s most intimate friends—whenever it conflicts with the judgment of the Party. Slogans and formulas became the means to this end, wielding hypnotic power when repeated over and over again, especially in the presence of others doing the same thing. This approach puzzled the authors of The God That Failed: They wanted to conclude on their own that communism is true, but they were told that one must only see what the Party saw and think what it thought. ....

Several of The God That Failed contributors remark on a particular moment that should have given the game away. When Silone, as part of an Italian delegation to the Soviet Union, asked to read a document he was told to condemn, he was told: “You haven’t yet understood what politics are all about.” Surprised at how the word “Trotskyite” was thrown around, Wright asked a communist man: “‘If you found me reading Trotsky, what would that mean to you?’ ‘Comrade, you don’t understand,’ he said in an annoyed tone. That ended the conversation.”

They had not yet “understood” the Leninist idea of truth: There is no such thing as neutral, objective truth, irrespective of political interests. Truth was whatever was useful for the Party to regard as true. “This way of thinking canceled out all experiential objections,” Spender explains: “The thousands of people in prison camps.... Do these exist? Whether or not they do, it is bourgeois propaganda to maintain so. Therefore one must deny that there are any slave labor camps in Russia,” and that’s all there is to it. .... (more)

Gary Saul Morson, "The Return of the God That Failed," The Free Press, July 24, 2026.

Half educated

I taught secondary U.S. History in public schools for thirty-five years. When I started, we did teach subject matter that slighted things like racism, labor strife, and the more unsavory aspects of American colonialism. It got better, though. Textbooks improved, but, more importantly, teachers learned, and teaching became more balanced. But then the pendulum swung too far, became far too cynical...and it hasn't swung back yet. Howard Zinn was part of the problem — his textbook, A People's History of the United States, became for many the textbook. From WSJ Opinion today: 

...[I]ts message could be summarized in two words: America stinks. The author believed most history textbooks offered only a whitewashed “nationalist glorification of country,” he told the New York Times. In response, he oversimplified the story in the opposite direction. America’s Founding Fathers? Just wealthy white men guarding their fortunes. Abraham Lincoln? A half-hearted abolitionist who was concerned about protecting “the interests of the very rich.” World War II? Sure, the Nazis were bad, Zinn concedes, but the U.S. and her allies didn’t really “represent something significantly different.”

A People’s History reads like a cross between a children’s book and a prosecutor’s brief. America’s downtrodden masses are uniformly brave and heroic; its leaders are one-dimensional villains. The author catalogs our nation’s every moral failure and unfulfilled promise. Every American should know about the evils of slavery and other stains on our past. But Zinn’s indictment scrupulously avoids the positive parts of the story. Other historians, including many on the left, slammed the book’s lack of context or nuance. "A People’s History is bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions,” wrote historian Michael Kazin. “What he did was take all the guys in white hats and put them in black hats, and vice versa,” added Princeton’s Sean Wilentz after Zinn’s death in 2010. ....

[A]dherents to Zinn’s ideology flatter themselves that they bravely see through the pro-American propaganda on which they were raised. That’s a joke. The era of simplistically patriotic textbooks ended decades ago. It takes no courage to spout the anti-American platitudes of A People’s History or the 1619 Project. That worldview is now the default for most half-educated young Americans.

Recently, this America Worst sentiment has grown white hot on the left. ....

But the populist right marinates in anti-Americanism as well. Tucker Carlson boosts vile claims that the U.S. government engineered the 9/11 attacks even as he defends Vladimir Putin. Podcast bros revive Zinn’s old debate about whether the Allies were the real villains of World War II. At both extremes, America’s enemies get a more sympathetic treatment than the U.S. itself does. .... (more)

James B. Meigs, "Howard Zinn’s Horrible History," The Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2016.

Reading Narnia again

I have begun to re-read the Narnia books, beginning, of course with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, not, as the current collections begin, with The Magician's Nephew. Alister McGrath, in my opinion, argues persuasively for for the publication order, with LWW first:

.... The most significant difficulty concerns The Magician's Nephew, the last in the series to be written, which describes the early history of Narnia. To read this work first completely destroys the literary integrity of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which emphasises the mysteriousness of Aslan. It introduces him slowly and carefully, building up a sense of expectation that is clearly based on the assumption that the readers know nothing of the name, identity, or significance of this magnificent creature. In his role as narrator within The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis declares, "None of the children knew who Asian was any more than you do." But anyone who has read The Magician's Nephew already knows a lot about Asian. The gradual disclosure of the mysteries of Narnia—one of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe's most impressive literary features—is spoiled and subverted by a prior reading of The Magician's Nephew.

Equally important, the complex symbolic structure of the Chronicles of Narnia is best appreciated through a later reading of The Magician' Nephew. This is most helpful when it is placed (following the order of publication) as the sixth of the seven volumes, with The Last Battle as the conclusion. .... (Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis - A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet, 2013.)

The first set of the Chronicles I bought (I own several), published by Macmillan in 1966,  used the original order. At the bottom of the cover above, it reads "Book 6 in the Chronicles of Narnia." At some point, that changed. In the more recent collection I own, published by HarperCollins, the Narnian chronology is used, with Magician first.

“To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.”

Allen Guelzo, historian of the American Civil War, comments on what was lost when Gordon Wood was killed. Wood was one of the most influential historians of the American Revolution. He died in a grocery store parking lot accident at 92. Guelzo on Wood:

...Wood made me understand how thoroughly stuck in the antique ways of pre-modern European society Americans were on the eve of 1776, a world in which slavery was treated with a shrug of the shoulders as just one more practice of servitude, and where commerce functioned within webs of patronage, not customers. The Revolution, Wood explained, constituted a sharp and decisive break with that world. Servitude disappears in America and slavery becomes an aberration that demands either bizarre excuses or unprecedented denunciation. Gentleman is no longer a rank for those who do not work with their hands, but merely a description of polite behavior; honor shrinks as a symbol of importance, and business becomes dominated by the mobility and impersonality of banks and paper money. With a jolt, it becomes clear how, in the span of a single generation, Americans become the people who Tocqueville admired and who elected Lincoln as president.

Wood’s trademarks were his strict attention to written sources, and his relative indifference to social, cultural, and ethnic history. .... When Creation was published in 1969, Wood was considered avant-garde because his revolutionaries seemed to pay no attention to the restrained and lofty political models of Greece and Rome. But he would remain just as resistant to the import of more recent ideological fashions into history writing, and especially the attempt to convert historical process into broad binary categories of oppressed/oppressor or settler/indigenous. In 2019, he broke with a large community of historians when he expressed his skepticism toward the 1619 Project’s proposal that slavery was the dominant fact of American life and that the Revolution was a device for protecting it. In Wood’s eyes, this was absurd. The 1619 Project might be pardoned as an example of over-wrought journalism, but it should not be mistaken for sober-sided history-writing, and it was important for the life a nation for historians to say so. “We all want justice,” he wrote, “but not at the expense of truth.” ....

As fully as he repudiated the 1619 Project, he also repudiated the more recent nonsense which insists that there is an American “heritage” conferred by ancestry from the Mayflower or Valley Forge. “There is no American ethnicity to back up the state,” he wrote in one of his last essays. To the contrary, it was the Revolutionary state and its fiery and universalistic Declaration of Independence which made the American nation. “To be an American is not to be someone,” he wrote, “but to believe in something.”

Gordon Wood understood that historians are the memory system of a democracy. Because the American democracy has been organized around a set of propositions which have political meaning, it is vital to understand where that political meaning came from, and that is the task of the historian. .... (more)

Allen C. Guelzo, "In Memoriam, Gordon S. Wood," National Review, June 10. 2026.

Good detective fiction

From CrimeReads, Jeffrey Archer selects the "the ten novels [he] return[s] to from before 1980," excluding Agatha Christie (who got her own list elsewhere). It's a good list. Some excerpts:

• 
  Sherlock Holmes had been dead for eight years when The Hound of the Baskervilles was published. Doyle had killed him at Reichenbach Falls in 1893 because he was tired of him; the public refused to accept it; and Hound—a chronologically earlier case, set before Holmes’s death—was Doyle’s compromise. It is also, by general agreement, his best novel. .... It is gothic. It is patient. Watson is alone on the moor for almost half the book—Holmes does not appear for chapters at a time—and the slow gathering of menace, the fog, the great dog, the family curse, are all sustained for two hundred pages without a single passage that drags. ....
• The Maltese Falcon became a worldwide bestseller, and rightly so. Sam Spade is not Sherlock Holmes. He’s bloody good. He’s not Sherlock Holmes. But it’s a damn good story. And I recommend it. .... Hammett wrote the way he had lived. He had been a Pinkerton operative. He knew, in a way no British crime writer of his generation could have known, what the inside of an actual investigation felt like. The dialogue is harder than English fiction permits itself to be. The morality is bleaker. The book is shorter than you expect. ....
• The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, written in 1939, is a classic—and of course became a classic film. Its genius is that Marlowe is Sam Spade with better lines. It’s famously complicated. Very difficult to follow at some points, but a wonderful story. .... [N]o reader reads Chandler for the plot. It’s the language. He captures Los Angeles. He captures America. He captures the people. You know you’re on the street with him. That itself is a gift. ....
• The Nine Tailors is set in a Fenland parish where the bell-ringers gather one New Year’s Eve to ring a peal of nine thousand changes—and somewhere in the course of that long, freezing night, a man dies. Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers’s amateur detective, arrives by accident. .... In the case of The Nine Tailors, what you have is the great Lord Peter Wimsey—who is not a detective. He is a member of the House of Lords. He is an aristocratic peer. He is an amateur. He just loves joining in.

The others include another Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night, Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, Maigret Sets a Trap by Georges Simenon, P.D. James' first Adam Dalgliesh novel, Cover Her Face, the first Inspector Morse novel by Colin Dexter, Last Bus to Woodstock, and an Ellis Peters Cadfael novel. (the full descriptions)

"The Top 10 Classic Detective Novels, According to Jeffrey Archer," CrimeReads, May 29, 2026.

War on the "pigs"

History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. In a review of Love and Terror: The Helter-Skelter History of the Manson Murders, attention is called to  approval of the Manson "family" murders by political radicals. The Mangione fans are hardly original:

.... Manson sought to discredit the entire proceedings, and was tutored in flamboyant disruptive tactics by Jerry Rubin, one of the “Yippie” (Youth International Party) activist prankster-protesters who’d caused mayhem by donning judges’ robes in court two years earlier, when he’d been charged with inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago.

Rubin claimed to have fallen “in love with Manson” after seeing his “cherubic face and sparkling eyes on national TV”. He wasn’t the only Leftist who saw Manson and his co-defendants as fellow travelers in the revolution to come. Members of the terrorist Weather Underground group equally toasted the Family’s supposed war on “the pigs”, meaning the ruling establishment, on the basis that the victims were white and wealthy. .... (more)

Travis Elborough, "Why Charles Manson was even more crazed than you thought," The Telegraph, May 19, 2026.

"Other forces at work..."

Wise counsel from a work of fiction:

...Tolkien’s assessment of history isn’t just the musings of some dour and curmudgeonly professor. His views never amounted to despair or cynicism; as is his read on history, they are tethered and illumined by hope.

This is alluded to throughout The Lord of the Rings. In the film adaptation, while Frodo and Gandalf are in the Mines of Moria, Frodo laments,

“It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum when he had the chance.” Notice how Gandalf’s answer isn’t merely a reprimand or a lecture on providence.

Gandalf: “Pity? It's pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play in it, for good or evil, before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.”

Frodo: “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”

Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides that of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, in which case you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.”

There are other forces at work, indeed. ....

In the epic of Tolkien’s literary masterpiece, he does in fantasy and fairy tale what few theologians and professors can do in lectures. In his characters, we see despair assuaged, courage enlivened, contempt tempered. Ultimately, Tolkien reminds us that God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise (1 Cor. 1:27). Precisely because this is what God does, we can trust that the best strategy for the church and for us individually in the Christian life is not to relent to our reactionary impulses but to “Let folly be our cloak!”

We might think hanging on to the ordinary means of grace is an act of despair, but it's not. We can’t fathom that in these plain practices, by faith, we are participating in the most powerful things in the world. Not in a methodological, technical, or pragmatic sense; the rituals of the church do not coax God as if he’s a feral animal. God’s mystical and mysterious work is beyond all of that. Rather, they are the very inbreaking of the New Creation in our lives.

You see, in a world where God has revealed himself, become incarnate, died for our sins, and risen for our justification, who promises to come again to judge the living and the dead, there is no room for cultural moods to dictate our life and ministry. .... (more)

Caleb Wait, "A Veil Before the Eyes of the Enemy: On Tolkien, Foolishness, and the Ordinary Means of Grace," Modern Reformation, May 19, 2026.

St Mary Mead

The New Criterion has published an excerpt from Theodore Dalrymple's soon-to-be-published book about Agatha Christie. I always enjoy reading Dalrymple, and I enjoy reading about Christie. If you have ever been a reader of Christie's mysteries, I think you would enjoy this. A few excerpts from the excerpt:

The literary critic Fredric Jameson captures the difference between English and American crime fiction in his book about Agatha Christie’s detractor Raymond Chandler:

the murder in the placid English village or in the fogbound London club is read as the scandalous sign of an interruption in a peaceful continuity; whereas the gangland violence of the American big city is felt as a secret destiny, a kind of nemesis lurking beneath the surfaces of hastily acquired fortunes, anarchic city growth, and impermanent personal lives.

With the destruction of gentility as an ideal in England, it is not surprising that crime writing in England should come to resemble its American equivalent, exceptions being made for the backward-looking or nostalgic stories set in a world that no longer exists. Murder has been democratized, or at least made demotic.

For myself, I have had enough to do with real murder in modern England to prefer the gentrified type in Agatha Christie. Most murder is merely sordid, unmysterious, stupid, and not infrequently drunken, or alternatively engendered by passions of a crude culture, of which I do not wish to be reminded when I read for pleasure. ....

The whole point of the murders in Agatha Christie is that they are committed in a milieu where they are least expected, a milieu in which people generally behave with refinement, carry no cosh, and do not stab each other to death in stupid drunken arguments.

She is aware that under any surface, however polished it may be, human nature remains the same. ....

She is always ready to draw an analogy between the events in her quiet, delightful, seemingly idyllic village of St Mary Mead, full of hollyhocks and climbing roses, and the criminality that she is investigating. When Mrs. Van Rydock first tells her that she (Mrs. Van Rydock) had a bad feeling about the atmosphere at Stonygates, Miss Marple at once recalls something that happened at St Mary Mead.

“I remember,” said Miss Marple thoughtfully, “one Sunday morning at church—it was the second Sunday in Advent—sitting behind Grace Lamble and feeling more and more worried about her. Quite sure, you know, that something was wrong—badly wrong—and yet being quite unable to say why. A most disturbing feeling and very very definite.”

The next day, Grace Lamble’s father, an old admiral with whom she lived, attacked her with a coal hammer and nearly killed her, claiming that she wasn’t his daughter at all, but the Antichrist posing as such.

Mrs. Van Rydock asks Miss Marple whether she had a premonition that something of the kind was about to happen, the implication being that there is, perhaps, a kind of mental faculty unrecognized by science. Miss Marple provides a rational explanation: “I wouldn’t call it a premonition. It was founded on fact—these things usually are, though one doesn’t always recognise it at the time.”

Grace Lamble, it turned out, had been wearing her hat the wrong way round that Sunday, and she was normally a most precise and careful woman. ....

Mrs. Van Rydock expresses surprise that such things go on in St Mary Mead, which she had imagined as a kind of paradise. Miss Marple replies: “Human nature, dear, is very much the same everywhere. It is more difficult to observe it clearly in a city, that is all.” .... (more)

Theodore Dalrymple, "Agatha Christie & the metaphysics of murder," The New Criterion, May, 2026.

"The sword glitters"

I only possess a few of Chesterton's thirty-some books: Heretics and Orthodoxy, of course, his Autobiography, a collection of Father Brown stories, and The Man Who was Thursday. I also have a couple of collections of quotations. He was eminently quotable. He was admired by C.S. Lewis, and that was what first brought me to him. In a very good essay, "Chesterton's Radical Sanity," Rachel Lu on his great strength and some of his weaknesses:

The only possible excuse for this book,” wrote G.K. Chesterton at the outset of his 1908 book Orthodoxy, “is that it is an answer to a challenge. Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.”

This is vintage Chesterton: witty, memorable, charmingly self-deprecating. Just two lines into the book, he already has readers fully engaged, hungry for further explanation. It’s a great lead-in to Orthodoxy, but also to Chesterton’s work more broadly.

Building on his intriguing start, Chesterton relates how the reviewers of his previous 1905 work, Heretics, had complained that it was unreasonable for him to engage in armchair criticism of their philosophies when he had yet to explain his own. “It was perhaps an incautious suggestion to make,” he notes, “to a person only too ready to write books on the feeblest provocation.” But though Orthodoxy is pitched as an answer to this challenge, Chesterton offers an important qualification. “I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it,” he explains. “God and humanity made it; and it made me.”

With a vast corpus and a wide range of interlocutors, Chesterton did a lot of shooting in his lifetime, hitting some targets and missing others by wide margins. He was winsome, whimsical, profound but also preposterous, maddeningly unsystematic, and often in error. Somehow even his bad shots feel dignified. And he himself reveals the reason here in the first lines of Orthodoxy. Chesterton understood his entire public career as a kind of answer to a challenge: the challenge of reductive, rationalist, soul-destroying pathologies of modernity. ....

...[H]e provides a wonderful conceptual framework to explain how tradition can help us cope with reality’s paralyzing complexity. If the world is large and chaotic, what is needed is an anchor, or perhaps a root, to attach human society to something firmer and more permanent than the whims and fantasies of a given moment. Tradition can be that root. A firm grounding in the wisdom of the past can enable the living to hold seemingly-conflicting truths in a dynamic tension, drawing stability and nourishment from the root in order to engage the world with confidence. More than just explaining this theory, Chesterton lived it, delineating a space much like what the humanist Lee Oser calls “the radical middle,” in which the strong root of Christian tradition and orthodoxy enables believers to hold a “center of sanity” that looks radical to observers from many different angles mainly because it reveals a reality that is in fact wonderfully strange. .... (more)

Rachel Lu, "Chesterton's Radical Sanity," Law & Liberty, April 1, 2026.

Gateway to history

I have commented before about historical novels I have enjoyed. I dislike those that take liberties with what is actually known about real people and events, but the good ones don't. The Telegraph presents a selection of "The 20 greatest war novels." The writer, himself an author of historical fiction, introduces his choices with reference to one of my favorite historical novelists:

As a boy, I devoured the historically accurate and side-splittingly funny Harry Flashman novels by George MacDonald Fraser, which track the disgraceful adventures of the notorious Victorian soldier-cad as he skulks and whores his way through the major conflicts of the 19th century. They stayed with me. And so shortly before writing my first novel, Zulu Hart, set during the Anglo-Zulu conflict of 1879, I interviewed Fraser. “Do you ever manipulate historical facts to suit your plot?” I asked.

“I try not to,” he replied. “The trick with real historical figures is to be honest and stay true to their spirit.” One of the few times he broke his rule was not being “quite fair” to Otto von Bismarck, the architect of German unification, in Royal Flash, the second of the Flashman series. “But he was such a swine anyway,” explained Fraser, “that I figured that was all right.”

To me, a good war novel should do exactly this: remain faithful to history while taking canny artistic licence to create convincing characters. It should rattle along at a decent pace and contain universal truths, jeopardy (no outcome is inevitable), and act as a gateway for readers to explore “proper” history. ....

Most of the twenty fictions are more serious than this one, but Fraser's ability to entertain made learning history fun:

Flashman (1966) by George MacDonald Fraser

Presented as the discovery of the long-lost Flashman Papers (a literary device that even deceived some American academics at the time), this hilarious, superbly researched book chronicles the army career of the notorious bully from Thomas Hughes’s popular Victorian novel Tom Brown’s School Days. Expelled from Rugby School for drunkenness, young Harry Flashman joins the infamous Lord Cardigan’s 11th Hussars and later becomes a reluctant secret agent in Afghanistan. Somehow our cowardly anti-hero emerges from the disastrous Retreat from Kabul with his skin intact, his reputation enhanced and his eye for the ladies unimpaired.

Saul David, "The 20 greatest war novels," The Telegraph, Feb. 28, 2026.