BY ROGER WATSON Based on a best-selling debut novel by Giuliano da Empoli and originally published in French (as Le mage du Kremlin), The Wizard of The Kremlin (2026) is a ‘factional’ account of the demise of Boris Yeltsin and the entry of Vladimir Putin onto the political scene in post-Soviet Russia. It was not well received by the critics. Described as ‘exasperatingly laborious’ in The Guardian, it scored … Continue reading The Wizard of The Kremlin
BY DEREK TURNER ‘Treasures on Earth – Buried Wealth in Landscape and Legend‘ Jeremy Harte, London: Reaktion, 2026, 292pps., £15 In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton offers some sensible advice as one of his ‘Remedies against discontents’ – “Seek that which may be found.” Jeremy Harte’s subtle and finely written new book examines the countless Britons who have taken exactly the opposite approach. Harte … Continue reading Treasure Island
BY DEREK TURNER Lancashire: Exploring the Historic County that made the Modern World In his classic 1902-1904 Collecteana, folklorist Vincent Stuckey Lean cites a proverb which has since passed into cliché – “Lancashire thinks today what all England will think tomorrow”. Travel writer Chris Moss’s task in this highly personal book is to show how his home county helped make modern England – and so … Continue reading The North for Greatness
BY ROGER WATSON Starring Bill Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins, Locked (2025) is a comeuppance film where a petty thief and all-round streetwise lowlife suffers for his crimes – one crime in particular – in a fairly horrible way. Skarsgård, or Bill Istvan Günther Skarsgård, has appeared in a few films of note, none of which I have seen and in mainly minor roles. While I liked his … Continue reading Locked
BY DR KAUSTAV BHATTACHARYYA I frequently pondered my failure to write even a single article on Indian Civil Service (ICS) officers, even though it is a central theme of my doctoral dissertation. This close connection to the subject has hindered me from producing anything since I completed my doctorate nearly a decade ago. The ICS was the administrative body responsible for the bureaucratic governance of … Continue reading A Tale Told By An Idiot
BY JAMIE FOSTER In 1949, the 10th Duke of Beaufort started Badminton Horse Trials with the idea of better preparing British riders for the Olympic Games after a disastrous showing on home ground the year before. His legacy is the world’s oldest and most prestigious horse trials, which has captured the imagination of riders worldwide and in 2024 celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary. Badminton is still … Continue reading Badminton Horse Trials at 75
BY NIALL McCRAE ‘We will cut immigration’, say the Tories for the umpteenth time. That’s after 13 years in government, and enabling a transformation in British society that exceeds even the efforts of Tony Blair’s New Labour. Conservative voters have only themselves to blame, for electing a party that deceives them every time. Multiculturalism and selectively applied laws against ‘hate’ have changed Britain for the … Continue reading Woke Racism: How the West is Divided & Ruled
BY THE EDITOR When I received The Deer Stalker’s Bedside Book in the post, I thought about sending it to a colleague to review. First, I know next to nothing about deer stalking and second, if I put the book beside our bed my wife would fast dispose of it, and quite possibly me. But when I’d skimmed the book a bit I was keen … Continue reading The Deer Stalker’s Bedside Book
BY ROGER WATSON In Banalysis, Frank Haviland tackles an unpopular subject: that people are different from one another. To even the casual observer it is obvious that people are different, but to say so these days is virtually an anathema. In our increasingly homogenised world, we are expected to accept that nobody wins a race, they merely participate. Nobody fails an examination; instead they receive … Continue reading Banalysis
BY ROGER WATSON Having reviewed Philip Tucker’s book The Jasmine Sari in these pages, I was very keen to read his first novel An Englishman in Terror. It is an entirely different kind of book, but I was not disappointed. If asked to summarise this novel in one word, it would have to be ‘misery’. Still, this is the well-crafted misery of the main character … Continue reading An Englishman in Terror
BY JAMES BEMBRIDGE As opening sentences go, ‘You f*cking Nazi c*nt,’ takes some beating. This was the charge made against Andrew Doyle not by some faceless internet troll but by an old friend to whose son he is the godfather. A left-wing homosexual with a doctorate in early Renaissance poetry, Doyle makes an unlikely flagbearer for fascism. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anyone to … Continue reading The New Puritans
BY ANDREW MOODY Scarcely ten years after David O. Selznick had triumphantly opened Gone With the Wind, he was walking along a deserted street at dawn and saying to a companion: “Hollywood’s like Egypt. Full of crumbling pyramids. It’ll never come back. It’ll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands.” Another subtitle for Otto Friedrich’s superb, … Continue reading City of Nets
BY ALEXIA JAMES In 1975, David Shepherd wrote his autobiography ‘The Man Who Loves Giants’. Even though he was only 44, he had already achieved more than most could have in three lifetimes. Right up until his death in 2017, he continued to paint a huge variety of subjects; founded the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation (which has, to date, raised over £10 million); renovated and … Continue reading David Shepherd – Artist and Conservationist
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN Stephen Pax Leonard is Research Professor at Moscow State Linguistic University. Educated at Oxford and the Sorbonne, he previously held positions at Oxford and Cambridge. A writer, linguist and traveller, he is the author of six other books on the Arctic and sub-Arctic region. Lucky for us, Stephen occasionally writes for Country Squire Magazine and his articles can be found here. Stephen’s … Continue reading Annals of Solitude
BY ANTONIA FILMER Madhav Nalapat is no stranger to the English-speaking world and has been a contributor to Country Squire Magazine. In the Manipal University professor’s latest book, “75 Years of Indian Foreign Policy”, is found a concise yet comprehensive review of India’s past, present and future bilateral relations and multipolar ambitions since Independence in 1947. Nalapat has from the 1980s considered India to be … Continue reading Journey of a Nation
BY JAMES BEMBRIDGE Konstantin Kisin is a comedian, political commentator and co-host of the widely celebrated show TRIGGERnometry. His first book, An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West, serves as a warning siren to those who take for granted the freedoms that Western Civilisation affords; freedoms of which Kisin’s grandparents – under the oppressions of Soviet Russia – could have only dreamed. Britain’s middle-class commentariat … Continue reading An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West
BY ALEXIA JAMES If ever a factbook on deer were ordered by the CIA, then A Guide to the Deer of the World by lifelong naturalist and countryman Charles Smith-Jones would be it. This 320-page coffee table reference book is cutting edge – including several species of deer which have only recently become known to science. The book is beautifully illustrated with colour photographs. It … Continue reading A Guide to the Deer of the World
BY JAMES BEMBRIDGE Titling her book on the assumption that it has, Joanna Williams delivers a powerful critique against this cultural cancer which has now metastasised itself into every aspect of our lives. It may seem absurd to afford a tabloid buzzword like Woke with any degree of intellectual seriousness, but Williams’ arguments – peppered with persuasive evidence and delivered in a scholarly and detached … Continue reading Has Woke Won?
BY ANDREW MOODY “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in…” Like almost every obsessive fan of The Godfather (1972) and its extraordinary sequel The Godfather Part II (1974), when I eventually came to watch The Godfather Part Three (1990) I was disappointed. Not only did it not include Robert Duvall as the Corleone family consigliere (director Francis Ford Coppola could … Continue reading The Death of Michael Corleone
BY ANDREW MOODY In a recent article about the onslaught (and danger) of Franchise pictures in the New York Times, fabled director Martin Scorsese wrote: Some say that Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I … Continue reading Batman 2022
