The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, October 26, 2025

Notably: I’m very fond of Hendrik Willem van Loon, the Dutch historian of the first half of the 20th century (he died in Connecticut in 1944, when he was just 62), and was famous enough to be the subject of tongue-waggers, as when in 1927 the New York Times reported that he and his new bride, the actress Frances Goodrich, were keeping separate apartments in Manhattan: “As I am a writer and my wife is on the stage, we have found that living apart is a very pleasant system, as my typewriter is going all day long while she is sleeping.” Separate rooms maybe, but he on 9th Street and she on 57th? Weeks later Goodrich’s apartment was robbed and thieves got away with $3,000. He wrote wonderful books, a history of the world, of the bible, of America, of the arts (that I’m currently reading), illustrating them himself just as wonderfully. He was incredibly prolific. But he had his wince-inducing prejudices that, at times, sound as if the equally prejudiced Jules Verne were informing his understanding of world religions or cultures. His Eurocentrism was almost aryan (ironic for a man banned from Germany once the Nazis took over). An example, as he wrote of Istanbul: “But for almost a thousand years, the inhabitants of Constantinople were never quite sure of the fate that the day of tomorrow would bring them. Their country was a small cork of civilization, floating disconsolately on an ocean of savagery. Corks have a great floating capacity but in the end they get waterlogged, deteriorate, and sink.” (Andre Gide wasn’t kinder when he wrote about Konya in south-central Turkey, a city he described as “by far the most hybrid, most vulgar and ugliest thing I have seen since I was in Turkey, just as I must finally admit that the country, the entire people, exceed in infirmity, apprehension or hope.” That was in May 1914, a different way of writing about the “sick man of Europe,” as a Russian tsar had referred to the Ottoman Empire 75 years earlier.) “But a Turkish Romeo and a Greek Juliet, in each other’s arms when not smoking or eating,” Anthony Burgess wrote in Any Old Iron (1987), “gave silent witness to the stupidity of cultural hate.” When Van Loon wrote of the pyramids in Egypt he kept referring to Egyptians as “little brown men” and “a rather grubby earth animal,” and though he gave credit to my ancestors the Phoenicians for giving the world the alphabet, he couldn’t help himself , describing Phoenicians as “undoubtedly the most cunning and rapacious of all the many crooked races that have infested the eastern half of the Mediterranean, which is saying a great deal. When it came to double-crossing their friends, these noble Greeks were such past masters in the rather unpleasant art of hocus-pocusing a neighbor that they sometimes succeeded in doing what few other races have ever been able to do and not infrequently managed to double-cross themselves.” Having known my share of Lebanese, I can’t say he’s entirely wrong, but I’m still hurt. It gets worse as he writes about Arabs, “these fast-conquering Arab hordes,” or tosses off careless lines like,  “Mohammed was the Hitler of the Arabs”(he’d be such a hit in Florida classrooms) and follows that up with this, as if the Catholic church, the wars of religion and the 1500 years of Christian bloodletting in and beyond Europe (from the genocide of Albigencians in the heart of France to the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade) never happened: “This absolute one-sidedness of the Moslems, this absolute conviction that there is no salvation outside their own creed, has to be stressed if we want to understand Mohammedan art.” To be fair, his tone-deaf lines were few, and his sharper insights routine, as when, in the shadow of the trumpism of his age, he wrote–as he might write today of the United States–“Of course, if Europe should insist upon committing suicide, as it seems intent upon doing, we might have to pass through a second Middle Ages before we return to a civilized form of life.”

—P.T.

Being therefore most intimately tied up with the daily lives of the people, the architecture of these churches was greatly modified by the geographical and social needs of the times. Large churches were out of the question because they had to be constructed entirely of wood. The slightly arched roofs of the Byzantine churches had to be given a steep slope to keep off the snow of winter. Under the influence of Asia, where the Buddhists had developed the bell-shaped cupola, the Russians evolved that strange looking bulb-shaped church spire which seems such an inseparable part of the Russian landscape. You may remember from picture postal cards you have received from central Europe that this same bulb-shaped church spire is also to be found in Austria and in Bavaria and in many other parts of central Europe. I have never found a satisfactory explanation for that curious coincidence. I rather suspect that the Austrian and Bavarian bulb architecture, which made its appearance during the counterreforma-tion in the sixteenth century, was brought to these mountain valleys by the Jesuits, who must have been influenced by some of the archi tecture which the Moors had left behind when they left the Iberian peninsula after having had it in their possession for more than six hundred years.

–From Handrick van Loon’s The Arts (1943).

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