Articles by R.J. Stove

(Unless otherwise indicated, copyright rests with the original publishers until six months after an article is published.)

• "O Pioneer: An Interview with Douglas Lawrence" (Organ Australia, June 2013): One of the dominating figures in Australian organ-playing and choir-directing turns 70 this year, and discusses in this piece his career path.
• "Clive James At Last" (The American Conservative, May-June 2013): Summing up the output (including the recent Dante translation) of the flawed but brilliant antipodean scribe who, at his finest, has achieved uniquely impressive things.
• "What Did You Do In The War, Benjy?" (The American Spectator, April 2013): Paul Kildea's new book on Benjamin Britten has its merits as prose, but is at times almost embarrassingly sycophantic, and its most audacious claim (the allegation that Britten had contracted syphilis) was discredited before it even hit the bookstores.
• "Booklet notes, Australian Chamber Choir concert" (April 6 and 14, 2013): Music by Byrd, Tallis, Orlando Gibbons, and Vaughan Williams.
• "CD Review" (Limelight, April 2013): There has never been a better time than now for exploring Buxtehude's organ music, to which both of the admirable releases discussed in this short article are devoted.
• "CD Review" (Limelight, March 2013): A collection of lovely Respighi orchestral works, not, on the whole, conducted with great flair.
• "Pedagogue and Proselyte" (Quadrant, January-February 2013): Notes on George William Louis Marshall-Hall, Melbourne's musical dynamo between 1891 and his sudden, premature death in 1915.
• "Close Encounter" (The American Conservative, December 2012): One of the Cold War's leading magazines, and how I ended up being (to coin a phrase) Present at the Destruction.
• "A Cathedral Organist's Career: June Nixon" (Organ Australia, December 2012): In February 2013, Dr Nixon will be retiring after no fewer than four decades of service at Melbourne's Anglican Cathedral. This interview gives some background to her interests and attainments over that period.
• "Editorial: Merry Christmas To All (Except Cranks)" (Organ Australia, December 2012): An analysis of some of the crazier remarks made in public places by those who hate the organ and who can't even provide coherent reasons for their hate.
• "Two CD Reviews" (Limelight, November 2012): Assessed in these short notices: a recording of selected organ music from Charles Tournemire's pen; and, still more unusually, a disc devoted to a strange hybrid instrument known as the pédalier.
• Booklet Notes, Australian Chamber Choir concert (October 14 and 21, 2012): Music by Purcell, Schütz, Barber, Bernstein, Britten, and others.
• "The Farther From The Scene of Horror, The Easier The Talk" (University Bookman, Spring 2012): An obituary for the supremely valiant, and often devastatingly funny, Paul Fussell.
• "Killer Culture: Have We Lost The Meaning of Iniquity?" (The American Conservative, September 2012): From the 1930s to the 1960s, Pamela Hansford Johnson was among Britain's best-selling novelists. Then, prompted by the Moors Murders, she actually dared to wrote a book suggesting that there might (shock horror outrage) be such a thing as evil. Biiiiiiiig career mistake.
• "Editorial: What Do They Know Of Organs / Who Only Organs Know?" (Organ Australia, September 2012): The dangers of undue specialism are at least as likely to impede organists' thinking as they are to impede the thinking of other musicians. This editorial attempts to sound a caution against such dangers.
• "The Female Muse" (Quadrant, September 2012): For a long time, antipodean musicology needed a seriously-intended, non-partisan book concerning local female composers. Women of Note, lately issued by a boutique press in Western Australia, fills the gap in an agreeable fashion.
• "Napoleon Invades Melbourne" (Mercator.net, August 14, 2012): A truly splendid exhibition of all things Bonapartist, at the National Gallery of Victoria.
• "Blasts from the Past" (Mercator.Net, July 20, 2012): It's extraordinary to think of how different a place Australia was three decades back, when I began having my prose published. Just how different, I hadn't fully discerned till I started taking thought on the subject.
• "Saint Sydney" (The American Conservative, July 2012):  My tribute to the funniest and wisest of all Anglican clerics, Sydney Smith. (The title was not of my own choosing, I must admit.)
• "Editorial: Where Do We Go From Here?" (Organ Australia, June 2012): Thoughts about magazine publication in general, about music magazine publication in particular, and about the dangers which lie in wait for those who would produce such periodicals. From the same issue: this guide to some obscure 19th-century German repertory well worth modern organists' time; and this interview with veteran Melbourne organist Gordon Atkinson.
• Booklet Notes, Australian Chamber Choir concert (April 28, 2012): Music by Bach, Pergolesi, Giovanni Gabrieli, Gregorio Allegri, and others. 
• "Orgel, Orgel Über Alles: How the German Organist Put His Foot Down" (Crisis, April 24, 2012): This discusses a wonderful new book, from a Cornell University professor, dealing with organ music history.
• "Bring Me The Head of Maria Stuarda" (Crisis, March 22, 2012): A fair-minded study, by English author John Cooper, of Sir Francis Walsingham is examined here.
• "CD Review" (Limelight, March 2012): Saint-Saëns's very rarely heard solo organ music - as distinct from the thrice-familiar Organ Symphony - has started to turn up on CD now. Which is all to the good, as the present short article tries to indicate.
• "CD Review" (Limelight, February 2012): A beguiling Naxos disc of more or less forgotten chamber works by the young Richard Strauss.
• "Everyman's Strauss" (The American Conservative, January 2012): Two new books about German music's greatest modern master, one book fully justifying its publication, the other only partly doing so.
• "CD Review" (Limelight, January 2012): The astonishingly versatile Anthony Halliday in another triumphant recital.
• "Editorial: 'Tis The Season To Be ..." (Organ Australia, December 2011): Thoughts concerning the festive season and the impact which it has (or should have, anyway) on antipodean organists. From the same issue: this discussion with Leipzig maestro Ullrich Boehme, and this review of recently republished sheet music by late-Victorian England's Sir John Stainer.
• "A Grief Unobserved" (The American Conservative, December 2011): What happened (apart from such obvious factors as alcoholism and Vatican II) to make Evelyn Waugh's last years so acutely miserable? Here's a hypothesis.
• "Hail, César Franck" (The American Conservative, November 2011): A piece intended to whet readers' appetites for The Big Book.
  
• "No Enemies on the Homintern Left" (The Remnant, November 5, 2011): Reflections upon the recent Hepworth case in Adelaide, and what it means for Australian Catholic officialdom in general.
• "For Katie" (Oriens, October 15, 2011): A small and particularly inadequate tribute to my godfather's late daughter, who during her long and excruciating illness showed a fortitude which I have never, with my own eyes, seen surpassed.
• "Half-Century Blues" (Spectator Australia, October 8, 2011): The title was selected by someone in the editorial office, not by myself (I originally called the submission "The Big Five-Oh"); but otherwise the printed version is unchanged from what I wrote.
• "Ravel Rousing" (The American Conservative, October 2011): Hard to write anything adequate in essay form about Ravel, that most conspicuously perfect composer of his age; but Roger Nichols's unfailingly fascinating new biography, written with style, is a good excuse to make the attempt.
• "Editorial: The Spice of Organ Life" (Organ Australia, September 2011): I have recently become the editor of this quarterly magazine for organists. As well as the editorial, I wrote for the September issue these repertoire notes, and this review of a splendid recent Melbourne concert by Canberra-born (but now Atlanta-based) Nicole Marane.
  
• "CD Review" (Limelight, Sydney, August 2011): A short tribute to the excellent recording recently released, on Melbourne's Move label, by master organist Douglas Lawrence.
• "Looking Back to 1956: Liturgical Music in America" (The Remnant, July 31-August 15, 2011): A glance at what actually happened in Catholic churches Stateside during the 1950s, as opposed to what people often think these days happened back then.
• "Book Review" (Musicology Australia, July 2011): A shortish notice of Thomas Donahue's useful, if unflashy, Style and Usage Guide to Writing About Music
• "Performing Traditions in Franck's Organ Music: What Price 'Authenticity'?" (Organ Australia, June 2011): The latest extract from my forthcoming Franck book.
• "Impressive Link With Old Vienna" (The Age, June 18, 2011): An obituary (substantially rewritten, alas, by an underemployed sub-editor at the newspaper concerned, who worked in at least one factual mistake) of the eminent composer and university lecturer Eric Gross. The death of Gross last April robbed Australian music of one of its most urbane and versatile creators.
• "Book Review [untitled]" (The Organ [UK], Spring 2011): The magnificent new biography of Charles-Marie Widor by Illinois musicologist John R. Near is discussed in this piece. A slightly different version of the same piece, meant for a more generalist audience, is here.
• "In His Rightful Place" (Spectator Australia, April 23-30, 2011): The annals of Australian music contain few composers who possessed the talent of Clive Douglas (1903-1977). For decades Douglas has been forgotten and, where not forgotten, underrated; but a new biography by his daughter could rectify this injustice.
• "'Evil, Be Thou My Good': Homosexuality, Therapy, and the Church" (The Remnant, March 31, 2011): A follow-up to last year's Remnant article about Catholic sex abuse, Australian style.
• "Franck after Franck: the Composer's Posthumous Fortunes" (The Musical Times [UK], Spring 2011) A long extract from my imminent biography of the composer.
• "To Soothe the Savage Red" (The American Conservative, March 2011): A review of Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets, by Yale's Wendy Lesser
• "Opera à la Française" (The American Conservative, March 2011): A rather dull recent survey of the subject is here considered.
• "The Master's Voice" (Limelight, March 2011): In memoriam Hugues Cuénod (the extraordinarily gifted Swiss tenor and latter-day Methuselah), who died recently at the age of, wait for it, 108.
• "European Union" (Chronicles, February 2011): Review of Harvey Sachs's flawed but impressive book on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
• "Composer and Author Had Many Strings to his Bow" (The Sydney Morning Herald, January 31, 2011): Obituary of Robert Trumble, whose pioneering work on behalf of Vincent d'Indy's music was particularly deserving of praise. A slightly different version of this obituary, which later was published (under a different title) in Melbourne's The Age, is here.
• "Beyond Panis Angelicus: Franck's Sacred Music" (Organ Australia, December 2010- February 2011): An article based, in part, on material in my forthcoming book on César Franck. The same issue contains a short review by me of a new Franck-related recording.
• "Wagner's Valkyrie" (The American Conservative, December 2010): Discussing a superb new biography of the Bayreuth master's indomitable and often alarming widow.
• "An Aussie Remembers Joe" (Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, October 4, 2010): Joseph Sobran (who died in Fairfax, Virginia, during September, aged sixty-four) was one of the half-dozen most brilliant people, and certainly the most brilliant writer, whom I have ever met. Even when I disagreed with him – as I often did – I could not deny his charm, gifts, and erudition. Eventually I came to know him quite well; this is an account of my dealings with him.
• "Letter to the Editor, The Washington Post" (October 3, 2010): Correcting a factual error in the broadsheet's Sobran obituary. This letter was not published by the newspaper, but was circulated widely via the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, publishers of much of Sobran's later work.
• "Book Review [untitled]" (Organ Australia, September 2010): Tribute to Colin Timothy Eatock's Mendelssohn and Victorian England, a fascinating compendium of little-known lore.
• "But What About The Lay Abusers?" (The Remnant, August 31, 2010): Why is it that, for all the millions of words published in the mass media about the priesthood's perverts, we never read anything in Australia about the lay sex creeps? What say we change (starting with the present piece) this antipodean culture of denial?
• "Aussie Election" (Chronicles, September 2010): This appeared shortly before the Australian national poll on August 21, and therefore in an inevitable ignorance of the result. Perhaps it serves as a tour d'horizon anyway.
• "Australia's August 21 Election: The Circles Have Exploded" (VDARE, August 28, 2010): A short debriefing which concerns the outcome of Australia's least conclusive poll since 1940.
• "Portugal's Hiroshima" (Modern Age, Summer 2010): An article about the notorious 1755 Lisbon earthquake. It was actually written back in 2009, well before New Zealand disaster footage had put us in mind of seismology in general.
• "Australia: The Way We Swig Now" (Quarterly Review, Summer 2010): In which I swallow a recently published chronicle of antipodean booze consumption.
• "How Aussies Lost Their Pride of Erin" (Chronicles, August 2010): A brief history of Irish-Australian relations down the last two centuries. Here a retrospective caveat is warranted. When writing this piece in early 2010, I was still underestimating (plenty of my co-religionists were likewise underestimating) the extent of scandalous sex abuse within modern Catholicism, Irish or otherwise. The succeeding two and a half years brought to me, as well as to many others (though to no discernible Australian bishops), the enforced wisdom of emetic hindsight. Accordingly I would not now, in September 2012, describe the Hibernian Church with the flippancy I brought to describing it earlier.
• "Anatomy of a Swindle: Live Aid, Twenty-Five Years On" (National Observer, July-September 2010): The silver jubilee of Bob Geldof's politically illiterate crusade which purported to oppose Ethiopian famine, while in fact guaranteeing more of it.
• "In Search of Sir Charles Petrie" (National Observer, July-September 2010): A profile of an eminent, yet now largely forgotten, British historian.
• "The Death of the WASP Down Under" (Alternative Right, June 30, 2010): When, and under what circumstances, did Australia's WASP elite throw in the towel? Because the process was very different from the downfall of this élite's American equivalent.
• "Fiery City' Not Without Hope" (Oriens, May-June 2010): What a relief visiting Liège was, after the Third World miseries of Britain's capital.
• "In Darkest London" (Chronicles, May-June 2010): A first-person account of a horrific 2009 trip to a once-gracious city.
• "A Patriot for Portugal" (The Remnant, May 31, 2010): Dr Salazar profiled, his successes and failures judged, in the light of a new biography.
• "I Didn't Choose Freedom, Freedom Chose Me" (Alternative Right, May 24, 2010): Looking back on the "forgotten boredom" (Philip Larkin's phrase) of my undergraduate years.
• “Book Review [untitled] (National Observer, March-May 2010): The Kennedy-Nixon 1960 contest’s religious aspects discussed.
• “Book Review [untitled] (National Observer, March-May 2010): Barbara  Ehrenreich, of Nickel and Dimed fame, has numerous worthwhile things to say about the substitution of political correctness for truth in the cancer “care” sector.
• "Poland’s History and the Power of ‘Coincidence’" (The New American, April 13, 2010): Prompted by the appalling plane crash which, last April, eliminated Poland’s governmental élite.
• "After Wagner" (Alternative Right, April 6, 2010): Attacking the masters in what South-African-born, American-based columnist Ilana Mercer has called "the age of the idiot".
• “Warsaw and Lodz: A Tale of Two Cities” (The New American, March 27, 2010): One of the Second World War’s most nightmarish episodes – the fate of the Lodz Ghetto – is dealt with here.
• “Confessions of a Non-Bestseller” (Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, March 10, 2010): The title says it all.
• “The Knight’s Tale” (Annals, March 2010): A feature about that underestimated Catholic lay fraternity, the Knights of the Southern Cross.
• "Old World Charm" (The American Conservative, March 2010): In Belgium during late 2009, I saw the past. It worked.
• “Mahler: Is It Just Me, Or …?” (Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, February 10, 2010): Thoughts on the celebrated composer to mark the forthcoming sesquicentenary of his birth.
• "England, R.I.P.: Peter Hitchens's Elegy" (The Remnant, January 31, 2010): The latest brilliant and depressing polemic by Albion's answer to Patrick Buchanan.
• “Pianarchy” (The University Bookman, Winter 2010): Nineteenth-century pianism was a weird and wonderful thing. This article attempts to explain what forms its weirdness and wonderfulness took.
• "Mendelssohn and Wagner: Friendliness, Enmity, and Obsession" (Organ Australia, December 2009): An amplified version of a speech I gave the preceding October, to mark the bicentenary of Mendelssohn's birth.
• “1914 and Christmas: What Might Have Been” (The New American, December 14, 2009): The most promising, and yet the saddest, of all Yuletides in modern history is here examined.
• “Scholar Among Rakes” (The American Conservative, December 2009): Much loved and much denounced, Lord Macaulay made a flawed but unforgettable contribution to how Victorian England saw its past and its present. Here is a profile of him; a more complete version of the article has subsequently appeared in a Sydney magazine, here.
• "That's Professor Ozzy Osbourne To You ..." (Takimag, November 7, 2009): In which Our Author explores the hitherto hidden linkage between Russell Kirk and heavy metal, a linkage hidden primarily on account of its nonexistence.
  
• "Cameras At Mass: A New Plague" (The Remnant, September 15, 2009): Why do so many people now suppose that the liturgy of the Catholic Church is primary a photo-op?
• “Ah Wilderness" (Modern Age, Winter 2009): Review of Andrew Barnett’s very fine, and extraordinarily comprehensive, Sibelius biography.
• “The Mozart of His Age” (Modern Age, Summer-Fall 2009): Is Mendelssohn’s time coming again? I devoutly hope so, and have tried in this piece to explain why.
• "Amateur of Genius" (The Salisbury Review, Summer 2009): Few full-length studies of conductors can even approach for sheer excellence  (let alone surpass) the book on Beecham which is discussed at considerable length here. Sir Thomas has been most handsomely served by his biographer and fellow-Englishman.
• "'Riccardo Wagner': The Mascot of Venice" (The Catholic Herald [London], 7 August 2009): An absorbing account of Wagner's Venetian sojourns is here lauded.
• "Love It Or Leave It?" (Chronicles, January 2009): In response to the messages that started coming my way during the second half of 2008, from aspiring American expatriates living in dread of an Obama presidency.
• "The Problem of the Catholic Fellow-Traveller" (The Remnant, May 15, 2008): Religions, no less than social activities, have their destructive gatecrashers. This article attempts to explain a recurrent problem in contemporary Catholicism.
• "Joyce Hatto and Pianistic Plagiarism" (First Principles, March 12, 2008): Rueful reflections upon the most elaborate, most impudent, and most financially pointless fraud ever to occur within classical music.
• "Six Honest Serving-Men” (The University Bookman, Winter 2008): Review of Jenny L. Presnell’s The Information-Literate Historian.
• "I Am Folk Music" (The New Criterion, November 2007): Two new books on Elgar, one pretentious and bad, the other unpretentious and good.
• "Blogging: A Postscript" (The Remnant, December 15, 2006): A response to critics of "Should Catholics Blog?" (see below).
• "Voice of  Thunder" (The New Criterion, December 2006): Hans Hotter (1909-2003) not only possessed one of the greatest operatic voices of his or any other time, but turns out to have been a charming, unselfish, and informative autobiographer.
• "The Spy Who Cured Me" (The New Criterion, November 2006): Review of Hugh Trevor-Roper's unexpectedly self-effacing Europe's Physician, dealing with the early 17th-century doctor and secret agent Theodore de Mayerne.
• "Should Catholics Blog?" (Oriens, Spring 2006): Examining the dangers of one exceedingly widespread habit among Catholics, and in particular American Catholics.
• "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 tendencies in the direction of 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.
• "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