Miles Pattenden

Miles Pattenden reviews 'The Invention of Power: Popes, kings, and the birth of the West' by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

December 2022, no. 449 • 25 November 2022

We live in an age that worships data. If Covid-19 has taught us nothing else, it is that arguments advanced via assertions of statistical significance are practically impervious to criticism. Naturally, quantitative-minded academics have become the high priests of this religion, and they now seem to think they are the authorities on everything. When they cynically use trendy tools to legitimise wh ... (read more)

Miles Pattenden reviews 'Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford between the Wars' by Daisy Dunn

November 2022, no. 448 • 25 October 2022

Oxford is not what it was once. We scholars swot too hard. Even the Bullingdon has lost its brio. It’s hardly surprising that this Age of Hooper has ushered in a cottage industry of aesthetes’ nostalgia, for many sense that the time when students could still be boys, and boys could be Sebastian Flyte, was just more fun. No reports, recorded lectures, or Research Assessment Exercises to interru ... (read more)

Miles Pattenden reviews 'The Invention of Power: Popes, kings, and the birth of the West' by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

October 2022, no. 447 • 29 September 2022

We live in an age that worships data. If Covid-19 has taught us nothing else, it is that arguments advanced via assertions of statistical significance are practically impervious to criticism. Naturally, quantitative-minded academics have become the high priests of this religion, and they now seem to think they are the authorities on everything. When they cynically use trendy tools to legitimise wh ... (read more)

Miles Pattenden reviews 'Maria Theresa: The Habsburg empress in her time' by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, translated by Robert Savage

June 2022, no. 443 • 25 May 2022

Few Australians today will have heard of the Empress Maria Theresa (1717–80). And yet this queen of Hungary and Bohemia, archduchess of Austria, ruler of Mantua and Milan, who was also grand duchess of Tuscany and Holy Roman Empress by marriage, bestrode the eighteenth-century stage like a dumpy colossus. The mother of some sixteen children, she styled herself as matriarch for a nation, while th ... (read more)

‘Father Stu: The consolations of a calling’ by Miles Pattenden

ABR Arts • 09 May 2022

What makes a man choose to be a Catholic priest? The cynical and snide these days might bring up an unhealthy interest in other people’s children. And yet, historically, the calling to the cloth has often been a noble one, as likely an impulse driven by spiritual yearning and zeal for social justice as mere careerism or a flight from normative sexuality. The Catholic Church, which faces a crisis ... (read more)

‘Benedetta’: Paul Verhoeven’s ‘convent life gone wrong’

ABR Arts • 07 February 2022

Catholicism gets a bad rap when it comes to sex these days. The Church fixates on condoms and abortion. It isn’t always big on homosexuality either. Paul Verhoeven’s ‘historically inspired’ film, on one level, explores the hypocrisies that arise from such callow credos: the religious renounce the flesh but flagrantly eroticise spiritual and interpersonal relationships. Carnal obsessions ab ... (read more)

Miles Pattenden reviews 'To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII' by Ambrogio A. Caiani

May 2021, no. 431 • 27 April 2021

To kidnap one pope might be regarded as unfortunate; to kidnap two looks like a pattern of abusive behaviour. Ambrogio A. Caiani tells the story of Napoleon’s second papal hostage-taking: an audacious 1809 plot to whisk Pius VII (1742–1823) from Rome in the dead of night and to break his stubborn resolve through physical isolation and intrusive surveillance. ... (read more)