Books, Arts & Manners: Climate of Treason

High Jinx, by Wm. F. Buckley Jr. (Doubleday, 261 pp., $16.95)

Wm. F. Buckley Jr.’s new spy novel is set mainly in Britain in the early 1950s against the backdrop of the internecine post-Stalin “war of the Kremlin succession,” which temporarily ended with the execution of the loathsome murderer and KGB chief Lavrenti Beria by his comrades. High Jinx is most assuredly entertaining, but it is not merely an entertainment. However urbane, Mr. Buckley is an evangelist, and his good news is, first and foremost, bad news: In season and out, he preaches the importance of knowing and meditating on the nightmarish history of the world since 1914, a period whose events are in such horrifyingly stark contrast to the expectations that had mounted from the hopes of Bacon in the early 1600s to the status of the religion of collective progress by 1900, when Swinburne could write, “Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the master of things!” Our century has been unkind to such flatulent blasphemy and self-delusion.

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).

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William F. Buckley Jr.

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High Jinx, by Wm. F. Buckley Jr. (Doubleday, 261 pp., $16.95)

Wm. F. Buckley Jr.’s new spy novel is set mainly in Britain in the early 1950s against the backdrop of the internecine post-Stalin “war of the Kremlin succession,” which temporarily ended with the execution of the loathsome murderer and KGB chief Lavrenti Beria by his comrades. High Jinx is most assuredly entertaining, but it is not merely an entertainment. However urbane, Mr. Buckley is an evangelist, and his good news is, first and foremost, bad news: In season and out, he preaches the importance of knowing and meditating on the nightmarish history of the world since 1914, a period whose events are in such horrifyingly stark contrast to the expectations that had mounted from the hopes of Bacon in the early 1600s to the status of the religion of collective progress by 1900, when Swinburne could write, “Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the master of things!” Our century has been unkind to such flatulent blasphemy and self-delusion.

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).