Tea at Trianon: “This Cursed Phenomenon We’re Experiencing”

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, February 23, 2026

“This Cursed Phenomenon We’re Experiencing”

From The European Conservative:

Bothelford’s Gone, Edward McLaren’s recently published novel, proves the struggle is ongoing. While not outright banned, this novel examining Britain’s twenty-first-century national shame has thus far been suppressed in all the standard ways. Though Amazon is known for endeavoring to sell everything, the book is unavailable from Amazon UK (though the American parent company sells it in the U.S.). As of this writing, Oldspeak Bookshop in Suffolk is the novel’s only confirmed UK retailer. Thus, an American writer is reviewing a British book, on a British topic, published by a small American publisher.

This is not a fictional account of the Rotherham crimes. The plot extends to the present day. It names the 2014 Jay Report and Rotherham itself. The fictional Bothelford, then, portrays the ongoing failures of late-stage liberal Britain, the malignant society that endures after its authorities did precious little to address Rotherham.

McLaren illustrates numerous defects of this society, perhaps to his detriment. We encounter attitudes to Tucker Carlson and Brexit, COVID lockdowns, and creeping technology. The narrator alludes to President Trump without naming him. A transgender-identifying character plays an unexpected role. McLaren accurately captures UK polite society, if this reviewer’s interactions with the British professional-managerial class are any indication. However, any readers from the ‘respectability’ camp—if they are willing to approach the grooming-gang subject in good faith—likely won’t read until the end.

Bothelford probably would have benefited from a first-person narrator. Too often, especially in the first half, the narrator tells rather than shows. We might give McLaren the benefit of the doubt. Do Western readers have a reference point for grooming-gang Britain without being told? Official narratives have insisted it is conspiratorial or extremist to talk about the subject. (“Tell me why The Financial Times isn’t talking about it, if it’s such an issue?”)

Can an author like Michel Houellebecq more easily employ a first-person narrator because readers can better comprehend his atomized, sexually depraved subjects? After all, McLaren argues pornography desensitizes young British minds to the crimes occurring in their midst. “He had been subjected to the mulching of manhood such that the English women, the little girls, would have no defence from the likes of him. It was deliberate. It must have been deliberate, all along.”

The novel gathers momentum in the second half. Bothelford’s corrupted criminal-justice, education, and local-government ecosystems are especially resonant, even if accounts of the crimes and resultant suffering are less so. The protagonists are born into Houellebecquian emptiness, not complicit in it. (Read more.)