Age Of Folly

America’s leading essayist on the frantic retreat of democracy, in the fire and smoke of the war on terror In office as President of the United States, Donald J. Trump is undoubtedly a menace, but he isn’t a surprise. He embodies the spirit of an age of folly abandoned to conspicuous consumption of vanity and greed. A self-glorifying photo-op, Trump is made to the measure of an infotainment media in which presidential candidates are game show contestants brought to judgment on election day before the throne of cameras by whom and for whom they are produced. To regard Trump as an amazement beyond belief is to give him credit where none is due, to mistake a symptom for the cause. Trump’s presence in the White House follows from an American regime change over the last twenty-five years during which a weakened but still operational democracy gave way to a stupefied and dysfunctional plutocracy. The history of that change is a hedge against the despair of the present, making possible the revolt against what G. K. Chesterton called “the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

Erasmus reached England after a stay in Italy early in the summer of 1510. Soon afterwards, in Thomas More's house at Bucklersbury, he rapidly wrote his famous satire, the Encomium Moriae, or "Praise of Folly," in which Folly celebrates her own praises as the great source of human pleasures. He had been meditating this piece on the long journey from Rome; it is a kaleidoscope of his experiences in Italy, and of earlier memories. As to the title, Moria, the Greek word for "folly," was a playful allusion, of course, to the name of his wise and witty host. This "Praise of Folly" is a satire, not only in the modern but in the original sense of that word,—a medley. All classes, all callings, are sportively viewed on the weak side. But in relation to the author's own life and times, the most important topics are the various abuses in the Church, the pedantries of the school-men, and the selfish wars of kings. If this eloquent Folly, as Erasmus presents her, most often wears the mocking smile of Lucian or Voltaire, there are moments also when she wields the terrible lash of Juvenal or of Swift. The popularity of the satire, throughout Europe, was boundless. The mask of jest which it wore was its safeguard; how undignified, how absurd it would have been for a Pope or a King to care what was said by Folly! And, just for that reason, the Encomium Moriae must be reckoned among the forces which prepared the Reformation.

In Edwardian London, a girl dreams of being an artist, despite her family's disapproval. Welcome to the world of the fabulously wealthy in London, 1909, where dresses and houses are overwhelmingly opulent, social class means everything, and women are taught to be nothing more than wives and mothers. Into this world comes seventeen-year-old Victoria Darling, who wants only to be an artist—a nearly impossible dream for a girl. After Vicky poses nude for her illicit art class, she is expelled from her French finishing school. Shamed and scandalized, her parents try to marry her off to the wealthy Edmund Carrick-Humphrey. But Vicky has other things on her mind: her clandestine application to the Royal College of Art; her participation in the suffragette movement; and her growing attraction to a working-class boy who may be her muse—or may be the love of her life. As the world of debutante balls, corsets, and high society obligations closes in around her, Vicky must figure out: just how much is she willing to sacrifice to pursue her dreams?

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Barbara W. Tuchman, author of the World War I masterpiece The Guns of August, grapples with her boldest subject: the pervasive presence, through the ages, of failure, mismanagement, and delusion in government. Drawing on a comprehensive array of examples, from Montezuma’s senseless surrender of his empire in 1520 to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Barbara W. Tuchman defines folly as the pursuit by government of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives. In brilliant detail, Tuchman illuminates four decisive turning points in history that illustrate the very heights of folly: the Trojan War, the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance popes, the loss of the American colonies by Britain’s George III, and the United States’ own persistent mistakes in Vietnam. Throughout The March of Folly, Tuchman’s incomparable talent for animating the people, places, and events of history is on spectacular display. Praise for The March of Folly “A glittering narrative . . . a moral [book] on the crimes and follies of governments and the misfortunes the governed suffer in consequence.”—The New York Times Book Review “An admirable survey . . . I haven’t read a more relevant book in years.”—John Kenneth Galbraith, The Boston Sunday Globe “A superb chronicle . . . a masterly examination.”—Chicago Sun-Times

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In twenty-five years of imperial adventure, America has laid waste to its principles of democracy. The self-glorifying march of folly steps off at the end of the Cold War, in an era when delusions of omnipotence allowed the market to climb to virtual heights, while society was divided between the selfish and frightened rich and the increasingly debt-ridden and angry poor. The new millennium saw the democratic election of an American president nullified by the Supreme Court, and the pretender launching a wasteful, vainglorious and never-ending war on terror, doomed to end in defeat and the loss of America's prestige abroad. All this culminates in the sunset swamp of the 2016 election-a farce dominated by Donald Trump, a self-glorifying photo-op bursting star-spangled bombast in air. This spectacle would be familiar to Aristotle, whose portrayal of the "prosperous fool" describes a class of people who "consider themselves worthy to hold public office, for they already have the things that give them a claim to office."

Angela Thirkell is perhaps the most Pym-like of any twentieth-century author, after Pym herself - Alexander McCall It's August in the Barsetshire village of Worsted, and Richard Tebben, just down from Oxford, is contemplating the gloomy prospect of a long summer in the parental home. But the numerous and impossibly glamorous Dean family - exquisite Rachel, her capable husband and six of their nine brilliant children - have come for the holidays, and their hostess Mrs Palmer plans to rope everyone into performing in her disastrous annual play. Surrounded by the irrepressible Deans, Richard and his sister Margaret cannot help but have their minds broadened, spirits raised and hearts smitten.

Explores the author's theorized evolutionary basis for self-deception, which he says is tied to group conflict, courtship, neurophysiology, and immunology, but can be negated by awareness of it and its results.