Recent links of note:
 

“Why John Bolton is no warmonger”
Roger Kimball, Spectator USA

John Bolton’s appointment to Donald Trump’s cabinet as National Security Advisor has provoked both admiration (among interventionist Republicans) and hysteria (among the Left and mainstream media). Left-wing media outlets—among them The Guardian, The New York Times, CNN, Slate, Salon, and others—have regurgitated the usual “end-of-world” panic. But evidence of past performance indicates that the former United States Ambassador to the U.N. is more rational pragmatist than emotional belligerent. As our own Editor Roger Kimball concludes in a recent article for Spectator USA, “John Bolton is no ‘warmonger’. He is a forthright man of peace who understands the dangers of pacifism in a world where evil is rife.  He would applaud, and rightly, the Roman military historian Vegetius: si vis pacem, para bellum: ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’.”

“The Sliming of Kevin Williamson”
David French, National Review

An appointment that has occasioned considerably less press coverage, but that has provoked a similarly feverish “tempest in a teapot” in certain diminutive circles, is that of Kevin D. Williamson to the writing staff of The Atlantic. Williamson, National Review’s erstwhile “Roving correspondent” and a former theater critic for The New Criterion, recently announced his departure for The Atlantic’s new “ideas” section. As is their wont, idle journalists on the Left have undertaken the task of combing through Williamson’s decade-spanning oeuvre as an establishment gadfly to pluck out his most putatively offending statements. Reviewing the outcry is David French, who writes: “If strongly left-leaning but not specifically ideologically-purposed entities such as the Times, the Post, or The Atlantic do as their critics seem to wish and cleanse their pages of conservative voices their critics deem unacceptable, then the loss to American intellectual life will be immense.” For another National Reviewer’s reaction to the dustup, read Jay Nordlinger’s piece, “KDW & WFB,” which appeared yesterday.

“Winston Churchill’s happy trees tour the US”
The Art Newspaper

Best known for his role as a leader in the fight to save civilization from the Nazi terror during World War Two, Winston Churchill was also a persistent oil painter. From his first forays into the medium in 1916 to his last works made three years before his death in 1965, Churchill painted more than five hundred pictures. He even wrote a highly regarded essay on the subject, “Painting as a Pastime,” which was lauded by the art historian Ernst Gombrich and written about in Gombrich’s seminal book Art and Illusion. As The Art Newspaper reports, a group of Churchill’s paintings will tour the United States this year, stopping in Palm Desert, California, San Francisco, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. For more on Churchill’s career as a painter, read Lee Pollock’s January “Dispatch” article, “Joy ride in a paintbox.”
 

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“Foucauldian despair at Covent Garden”
Paul du Quenoy

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