Pope Francis has returned from touring Hungary, a bastion of European conservatism, where his mixed messaging is seemingly at odds with national sentiment. At a Mass celebrated Sunday in Budapest, His Holiness called on the Hungarian government — led by…
Last century, many people still associated the Left with fun controlled chaos and the Right with boring, strict, and violent uniformity. It made an amusing caricature, I guess, to pitch the French May against fascist uniforms, which is the typical…
Venice is an artificial miracle, a metropolis of gold and marble and crumbling brick and peeling stucco improbably set afloat upon the Adriatic, anchored in its lagoon by alder stakes confidently driven into a shifting subsoil of silt and sand….
Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna Edited by Noah Isenberg; translated by Shelley Frisch (Princeton University Press, 224 pages, $19 paperback) How did Billy Wilder (1906-2002) become the Hollywood legend who created such film classics…
I heard the news last Wednesday morning. My wife and I were doing our annual Christmas trip to Pittsburgh’s historic Strip District, a wonderfully authentic half-mile strip of ethnic grocers and markets and restaurants — Sunseri’s, Wholey’s, Pennsylvania Macaroni, Labad’s,…
World War II ended almost 80 years ago. Much of Europe was in ruins. Germany and the Soviet Union probably suffered the most from the fighting. Perhaps Poland the most from the occupation. In a just world, the aggressors —…
“You can make the earth a magnificent garden — or you can make it a desert of death.” -The pope, addressing the people of Rome in the summer of 2022 “The pope might want to look into his own backyard…
The European elite’s sour reaction to the rise of Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s next prime minister, reveals less about her politics than its own. It harbors a death wish for Europe — a willfulness passed off as a “progressive” ideology that…
In the wake of the French Revolution and the disastrous Napoleonic wars, Europe’s conservative regimes — Austria under Francis I, Prussia under Frederick William III, and Russia under Alexander I — formed the so-called Holy Alliance to uphold monarchical values…
