– Architectural historian Catesby Leigh looks at Ralph Adams Cram and Pittsburgh’s gothic architectural legacy.

– In October for the first time ever Polish voters handed a parliamentary majority to a single party, putting the Law and Justice (PiS) party in power after nine years in opposition. But, alarmed by the new government’s attempts to correct the stacking of state media by their political opponents, western European powers have attacked the new government and suggested it be investigated by the European Union.

The PiS delegation of the European Conservatives & Reformists Group in the European Parliament has released a measured statement asking What is really happening in Poland? Given recent events in Cologne, however, Polish fans at a volleyball match in Berlin viscerally suggested the Germans should get their own act in order before criticisng others.

– Polish academic Artur Rosman explores both the history and future of the pro-life movement in America, citing the New York Times’s Kristen Dombek’s surprise at discovering that abortion is not an exclusively conservative concern:

Among those of us who wish to protect access to abortion, it’s easy to feel that “right to life” language is a cover for an attack on feminism. It’s a feeling supported by a common story about ­history: The anti-abortion movement began after Roe v. Wade, because conservative evangelicals were threatened by women’s newfound power over their bodies. What else could explain the movement’s swift rise in the decade following the Supreme Court’s decision, if not a widespread reaction against equal rights? […]

[I]t’s hard to imagine a country where the most prominent voices against abortion were Catholic physicians, and evangelical Protestants were either in favor of lifting restrictions on abortion, or didn’t really care. A country where Democrats and the Black Panthers opposed abortion, and Ronald Reagan, like most conservatives, supported it. Where more men than women supported legalizing abortion, and Hugh Hefner was one of those men, leading one activist to call legalized abortion the “final victory of the Playboy philosophy.” Where opposition to abortion found common cause with opposition to the exploitation of women, to the abandonment of the poor, to big business and to the Vietnam War.

– And finally, Sam the Eagle has a message for all the prospective candidates in the American presidential election:

– Imagine you find out your mother has been killed. Then imagine her killer not only goes unpunished but that he’s subject to a continual stream of awards and honours. At school your son is handed a leaflet promoting the man who ended his grandmother’s life. The only objectors (Catholics and Holocaust survivors) are easily brushed aside.

This isn’t an alternate universe: this is Belgium today, as the New Yorker reports. (via M.B.D.)

– Fr Edmund Waldstein relates a stimulating dialogue upon Star Wars between Over-Bearing, Past-Bearing, and Baring (with a cameo appearance from Duff Cooper).

– I’ve mentioned Tolkein and his love of Finnish before. More recently, the BBC inquired about Finland’s influence on the writer.

– “It’s the most nauseating display in American public life,” says Kevin D Williamson in his splendid jeremiad, “and I write that as someone who has just returned from a pornographers’ convention.”

– Fredrik de Boer puts his head above the parapet and gives us a little insight into how things work.

– And finally, some good news: a study claims French is set to overtake Chinese as the world’s most widely spoken language by 2050. (But, as P.E.G. noted in 2014, the methodology is a bit dodgy.)

Let’s hope they’re reading Bossuet rather than Voltaire.

– Ross Douthat’s sensitive and thoughtful commentary on the state of the Catholic church (in the New York Times, of all places) has previously sparked apoplexy on the part of liberals, hilariously inspiring a host of bien-pensant establishment lefties to point out he has “no professional qualifications for writing on the subject”.

In a recent blog post, Douthat points out how difficult it is to engage in dialogue with lefty Catholic thinking given that it often assumes we can reinterpret anything whenever we want while ignoring centuries of fervent intellectual inquiry and church teaching. For these liberals, it is always Catholicism: Year Zero.

– The British writer Tibor Fischer is no conservative, but he’s often written how ridiculous it is for people to claim the Viktor Orbán is a dictator, whether in the Guardian or in Standpoint. (I myself had to take to the pages of the Irish Times to defend the Hungarian PM.)

Now Fischer writes in the Telegraph asserting that Viktor Orbán is no fascist: he’s David Cameron’s best chance at reforming the European Union.

– Still in Hungary, the British Embassy in Budapest is moving out of its home of nearly seventy years and into the recently vacated Dutch embassy.

– Everyone loves the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Alex Massie says. But still no one will vote for her.

– Agnostic Southern Episcopalian chain-smoking monarchist with a penchant for misanthropy: Florence King, RIP.

– Speaking of misanthropy, is Groucho Marx’s humour nihilist? Shon Arieh-Lerer thinks Lee Siegel’s book might be overthinking things a bit.

– And finally, the United Nations Library in New York has announced which of its books was checked out the most often in 2015: Immunity of heads of state and state officials for international crimes.

The County Carlow seat of the MacMorrough Kavanaghs, ancient Kings of Leinster, whose sixteenth generation live here still.

Architectural historian Gavin Stamp argues that if Rhodes really was such a vicious baddie as his opponents claim, why stop with just removing his statue?

South African academic and Rhodes scholar R. W. Johnson has compared the campaign to remove Rhodes statues to ISIL’s destruction of antiquities in the Middle East while clerical commentator Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith recalls the damnatio memoriae.

Most interesting perhaps is the treatment of Rhodes not in the ivory towers of Oxford or Cape Town but in the land that once bore his name. Rhodes’s grave still lies in a prominent spot in the Motopos, but even President Robert Mugabe is against exhuming him.

From the Telegraph:

The last time that a call was made for the grave in the Matopos to be exhumed, Middleton Nyoni, then Town Clerk of Bulawayo, offered a telling response. “It is the Taliban who destroy history – and I am not a Taliban,” he declared. “After Rhodes’s grave, who is next?”

When Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980, the city fathers of Bulawayo shifted Rhodes’s statue from the town centre to the town museum, while covering up the plaque commemorating his indaba with the chiefs of the Matabele. But in 2010 the city council voted to uncover the plaque while last year the Zimbabwean playwright Cont Mhlanga provocatively suggested returning Bulawayo’s statue of Rhodes to its former place of prominence.

U.C.T. has dumped Rhodes – though he remains elsewhere on Table Mountain – and his statue is still at Oriel… for now.

– This time last year, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry asked if the Christian revival was starting in France. My pilgrimage to Chartres provided me with evidence that the faith across the Channel is deep, strong, and growing.

Now, looking forward to the year ahead, P.E.G. notes that Catholic France used to be old and rural — now it is young and urban: “In the major cities, all the churches are full on Sunday morning, something unthinkable even 10 years ago.”

– Former CIA agent Philip Giraldi visits Russia for the first time.

— All across the world, evidence shows that poverty is dropping dramatically. Why then, Fraser Nelson asks, is it so hard to believe?

Bicycle polo at the Wellington Monument in the Phoenix Park, 1938.

— It was once thought that when a key doctrine is abandoned or modified there is no turning back. But, writes Richard J Mouw at First Things, the turning-away from theological liberalism at Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit should make us think again.

— Christopher Akers at Quadrapheme argues Dostoevsky is right that beauty will save the world.

— Norfolk MP and former Guards officer Adam Holloway spent his teenage gap year fighting with the Afghan resistance against the Soviets.

An eccentric undergraduate in Edinburgh I knew exhibited a rare progressivism when she argued that in Afghanistan, the West should’ve backed the Soviets and backed them hard. I’m not convinced.

— “The overwhelming aesthetic is glam,” writes Nasri Atallah in his insider’s guide to Beirut for the Guardian. “People even dress up to go to the grocery store.”

— Underreported: Prince Charles has made a personal donation of £2,000 to St Patrick’s Church, the Catholic parish in Belfast targeted by Protestant Loyalist marchers.

A curious thing about London is that, even though it’s a world-class global city with all the tiresomeness that entails, it often manages to feel small and somewhat cozy. This is only enhanced by numerous chance encounters when one runs into friends on the street without any forethought.

Late on a Saturday in November I had just made a rather wet and windy crossing of the Solent: my hovercraft had been cancelled and I had to take a much later catamaran instead. I arrived in London, late, soggy, and laden with a sack of apples gifted to me by the nuns of St Cecilia’s Abbey from their orchard there on the Isle of Wight. Not feeling quite up to the evening’s plan of a drink in Marylebone and a night on the tiles all the way out east in Dalston, I demurred and opted for other plans.

Something calm and quiet was called for — a film at the Curzon on the King’s Road. Having purchased a ticket to see Spielberg’s latest (‘Bridge of Spies’) who should waltz up along the pavement but James, who I’d just been speaking to at 1:30 that morning, and Frankie, who I hadn’t seen in far too long. They were immediately convinced to join in and thus we made up a troika at the Curzon, which is going to be torn down and shifted next door to the old Gaumont under the Cadogan Estate’s latest plans.

Franks and I remained outside as James went in to buy tickets and then who should pop out of the cinema but the great Charles Dance himself. Even more satisfyingly — for Francisca and I are ideological smokers — he immediately pulled out a cigarette and lit up. It’s good to see the old ways die hard.

Dance put in a superb performance in the BBC’s dramatisation of Agatha Christie’s ‘And Then There Were None’ broadcast over the Christmas break. The dark and chilling adaptation returned to the book’s original grim storyline rather than the happy ending Christie invented for the 1943 stage version.

But last night’s premiere of ‘Deutschland 83’ steals the biscuit in telly-box news. The drama follows a 24-year-old Volksarmee officer sent to the West to spy for the GDR as aide-de-camp to the Bundeswehr general charged with handling the plan to site American Pershing-II missiles in West Germany.

‘Deutschland 83’ had aired on RTÉ 2 late last year so whisperings had crossed the Irish Sea warning me to keep an eye out for it. I love a good spy thriller and was disappointed that the Beeb decided against a second season for last year’s ‘The Game’, which followed 1970s MI-5 agents foiling a Cold War plot against Her Majesty’s Government. Channel 4 is picking up the slack, not just with D’83 but also the French political drama Les Hommes de l’ombre (being broadcast here as ‘Spin’) debuting Friday 8 January.

Television used to be the most boring thing in the universe. Good to see some things can actually get better.

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