Sometimes look on the bright side of life

It is not uncommon to hear people say that they are exhausted with the news cycle. Tragedies and crimes can make us jaded and pessimistic. Yet those looking for a rest from everyday miseries might not need to turn away from their favourite journalists — not if they appreciate the work of three of the most significant conservative writers in recent times. 

Although their work can be pessimistic and condemnatory, there are occasions — too often overlooked — where they step back from the darker aspects of the world and remind us, in powerful ways, of some of the valuable things that politics might defend. 

Peter Hitchens is admired for his political commentary, most famously in The Mail on Sunday. Those drawn to his journalism might appreciate his different, warmer, more reflective guise in articles at The Lamp, where he embarks on meaningful cultural journeys, recollects personal experiences, and gives form and texture to vanished worlds. 

In his piece “Secret, Elusive, and Uncommon”, for example, Hitchens reflects on being taken to the cinema for the first time in Plymouth as a young child by his mother to see Bambi. He remembers enchanting experiences before the big screen and pulls the reader into the past, describing a distinctly British tendency towards smartness, form, and decorum. 

The glamour of his first cinema visit, which felt like an “occasion”, is vividly and movingly retold. He reveals a world of “polished chrome doors, wide steps carpeted in rich red, long heavy curtains of the same colour”. Even when we consider that recollections from childhood can be somewhat rose-tinted, this setting clearly had more allure than your local Vue. Hitchens does not remember much about the film and reflects: “It was the splendour which I loved the most. … The sense of ceremony, of being allowed into something secret, elusive, and uncommon, remains with me now.”

Hitchens credits these experiences with imparting to him the virtue of subtlety and recalls “rapt audiences, led through curtains and tall staircases into a sequestered world, and gradually soothed into silence by confectionery and advertisements, where we all entered into the illusion.” He recalls his positively terrifying experience of watching The Innocents, released in 1961, and the destruction of his favourite moment of the film by a raucous crowd when he saw it a few years later at a university movie show. Perhaps the unruliness and absence of propriety were indicative of cultural change and the upending of the world Hitchens wistfully describes.

Those unaware of this side of Hitchens might be surprised to read such fond remembrances. In this personal style, he complements rather than counters his primary purpose as a bitingly critical political journalist. If political expression does not afford the opportunity to dignify the public space, make it smarter, and encourage manners and mutual respect, it is poorer for this incapacity. For all his attention to themes of decline, Hitchens finds time to illuminate us culturally, and his work encourages us to retrieve and restore some of the best things from times past that most people alive today never knew first-hand. 

Like Hitchens, Mark Steyn, is known for his political commentary, and two of his most famous works America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (2006) and After America (2012), are as preoccupied with themes of loss and foreboding as their titles suggest. But Steyn can find time to focus more fully on cultural matters over politics, and his work shows us how order and a sense of duty in public might be encouraged by those in positions of power and influence. 

The obituary, for example, provides writers with a great chance to merge reactive thought with deeper considerations, and Steyn excelled at this when writing about the Queen Mother in the article Smiling Through, published in his Passing Parade (2006). For him, she personified the endurance of the British monarchy when almost all the other crowns of the world, including those of her husband’s cousins in Germany and Russia, had perished.

In reflecting on the passing of Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon (1900-2002), Steyn employs history to make a statement about the role of rulers. He evokes a time when form and propriety were given greater emphasis and epitomised by the noblesse oblige of the Queen Mother. In what is a serious piece, Steyn also finds room for his characteristic humour: “If she was a performer, she was an old fashioned one — the kind who does the show and lowers the curtain, rather than heading off to Diane Sawyer to talk about sex and battles with alcohol.”  

Steyn acknowledges the way the Queen Mother shared in the experience of her subjects. She worked at her castle home as an orderly in WW1 when it was repurposed as a hospital for convalescing soldiers8, and she was in the drawing room of Buckingham Palace when it was bombed in WWII. She said in response: “I’m almost glad we’ve been bombed. Now I can look the East End in the face.” This is something that Steyn reasons our rulers should be able to do. This is as relevant in 2026 as it was in 2006.

Someone who often covers the same intellectual ground as Steyn is Douglas Murray. Those familiar with Murray’s work will inevitably associate him with pessimistic commentary on the influence of Islam, mass immigration, and “woke”. 

In The War on the West (2022), which is his retort to many of the aspersions made by the left about Western culture in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, Murray eloquently dissolves claims that the treatment of other cultures by the West can be characterised by disregard and Eurocentrism. Murray shows a loftiness that evades those whose accusations spurred him to write the book, and he offers examples of Western composers receiving other cultures openly with a desire to learn about them.

Discovering the more affirmative sides of some of our favourite thinkers should remind us to make time for the brighter sides of life

For example, Murray notes the English composer Michael Tippett (1905-1998), whose oratorios of the twentieth century drew on the influence of African American Spirituals. Tippett gave this music a platform for the whole world to admire and share in. Turkish influences came to Haydn and Mozart through the Habsburg Empire, and this presence in Mozart’s The Magic Flute was no theft by him, but “simply an expression of the same ravenous appetite for new sounds and ideas that all great composers have.” When describing what is a treasure chest of cultural merging, Murray slows his pace. He opens a rich portal, where one can journey through the cultural ages, and feel immense appreciation. More positive writing like this might encourage others, including politicians, to grasp and defend the cultural inheritance that Murray so dearly cherishes. 

The above examples register the broader cultural significance these writers have beyond the news. These works point to the value that we might retrieve from our past, and the positive spirit in which we can learn from others. It would be nice if more writers would follow this example. Now that the sun is out, discovering the more affirmative sides of some of our favourite thinkers should remind us to make time for the brighter sides of life.