This year that is fast disappearing will not be remembered in these quarters with very much warmth. It was a fairly hideous, sickening year, the year that I felt I got old. But like all good things, the bad ones come to an end as well, and thanks to some much appreciated end of the …
Amid all the photographs of Nazi atrocities, I find these placid images uniquely appalling.
Thank goodness this crap campaign is over. It turned out to be a bit of nail-biter, but it should never had been so close. Obama should have walloped Romney, who was a man with no rational to his candidacy other than that he wasn’t the incumbent. In some other era this might have been enough, …
Nobody ever said it better than John F. Kennedy, speaking before a rally in Boston Garden on November 7, 1960, the day before the national elections: “This is an important campaign, because it involves a high and distinguished office, an office which is given great responsibilities and great powers by the Constitution, and also by …
Why isn’t President Obama running harder against Congress? The president was effective in Tuesday’s debate, but he won only narrowly, even though Mitt Romney revealed an ugly side of himself that fits all the stereotypes about bullying bosses. Everything about the way he handled himself underscored the old “I love firing people” image. When he …
In the wake of Mitt Romney‘s problems this week with remarks that he made at a fundraising dinner in May, Bloomberg ran an article about another swell dinner that doomed a Republican presidential candidate in 1884. According to an article by Richard John of the Columbia Journalism School, in October of that year, the GOP …
On this, the 150th anniversary of the battle of Antietam, which, thank God, has not yet been replaced as the bloodiest day in American history, please allow me to recommend a new history of the battle, Richard Slotkin‘s The Long Road to Antietam. As the title suggests, the book is about much more than the …
It is a hard job being a sequel, but it is nearly an impossible task to be the second book of a trilogy. The first book gets all the benefit of the first blush of a love affair between the subject and the reader, and the third cashes in on the great drama of the …
The Royal Philharmonic, accompanied by the Royal College of Music Chamber Choir, really brought it for the musical finale of the Diamond Jubilee Flotilla. I tell you, those girls can sing in my boat anytime. Sorry for the lousy production value, a lamentably shorter but much sharper version can be found here on the BBC …