1,741 words
From the early 1960s onward Buckley was easily goaded to sue, generally on account of casual insults, libels and calumnies that would be tossed off in print or on television, and just as easily forgotten in a week if he didn’t draw attention to them. As a public figure who courted controversy, he should have gained a thicker skin as time went on. (more…)
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And so now we move on to the index, that dark, revelatory underbelly where we find who’s been put in and who’s been left out of the story Tanenhaus and company want to tell us. After 15 years of research, writing, interviewing, and re-fact-checking, the book must have first emerged as a draft twice the size of the present doorstop. Great hunks of material had to be excised. (more…)
1,582 words
Sam Tanenhaus
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America
New York: Random House, 2025
This month the Postal Service issues a new “Forever” stamp honoring William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008). Its portrait is distinguished by a) being black-and-white, like a photograph, and b) not looking an awful lot like the gentleman in question. (more…)
2,211 words
Deborah Baker
Charlottesville: An American Story
Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2025
I’d like to report that this hefty book (480pp but feels more like 840) offers some new findings and insights about the events leading up to the Charlottesville ruckus of August 12, 2017. (more…)
London days, c. 1940. René Pleven looking deceptively mousy.
London days, c. 1940. René Pleven looking deceptively mousy.
4,258 words
Many, many years ago — say, during the Nixon administration — I was peripherally involved with kiddy television. Kiddy TV was very hot just then, particularly up in Boston, where they had at least four “educational” kiddy shows running concurrently. (more…)
1,898 words
Steven F. Hayward
M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom
New York: Encounter Books, 2022
Is it possible to be a real old-school conservative or Man of the Right, and not — sooner or later — cut corners, betray your principles, sell out? Or — as we liked to put it seven or eight years ago — cuck?
This question was in the forefront of my mind as I dipped into this richly entertaining new biography of M. Stanton Evans by Steven Hayward. Surely, I thought, Stan Evans is going to disappoint us sooner or later. (more…)
2,785 words
One of the great unexpected pleasures of the Covid lockdown last spring was discovering oddball television series you otherwise wouldn’t have approached with a barge pole. Producers and programming executives detected a nice angle here, so they moved up launch dates by a few months. This is what happened with Mrs. America, a nine-part FX series with Cate Blanchett that debuted on Hulu last April and May, instead of its originally scheduled launch in July and August. (more…)
1,844 words
1,844 words
Christopher Caldwell
The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020
In January, when I first read and reviewed Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement, I couldn’t help noticing that the book was being hit by a broadside smear-attack, impressive in its vitriol. (more…)
1,821 words
Recently, the New York Times’s former book reviewer Michiko Kakutani treated us to a 3,000-word summary of everything that’s wrong with American life and politics, entitled “The End of Normal” (December 29, 2019).
At least, the column is attributed to Ms. Kakutani, and carries her byline. Actually this farrago of nonsense looks like something a committee of ghosts might produce (more…)
2,147 words
One of the delights of revisiting old movies after many years is finding out that you completely misread or misremembered certain scenes. Early on in the first part of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, we have the entry parades of the national teams. When the French team come by, they drag their flag in the dust – because, or so I assumed decades ago, these robust athletes were utterly disgusted with the new Popular Front government under the hapless Léon Blum (more…)
1,699 words
Unity Valkyrie Mitford was born on August 8, 1914 and died of the aftereffects of a head wound on May 28, 1948. One of six sisters from a landed, aristocratic English family, she became fascinated by the National Socialist movement in Germany while still in her teens. At 20, in Munich, she met Adolf Hitler. At 25, she was plunged into such despair by the outbreak of war between England and Germany that she shot herself with a pistol, in a Munich park. She returned to England, via neutral Switzerland, on a stretcher.
1,397 words
Surely, Ian Fleming’s final book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, is also his finest work of fiction. Published 54 years ago this month, shortly after Fleming’s death, it is visibly superior to the James Bond books in so many ways.
For one thing, it has pictures. Fleming and his editors struggled long and hard to select the right illustrator. The drawings by the illustrator who was eventually selected, John Burningham, are note-perfect and meld perfectly with the text. (more…)
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Steven Brill’s Tailspin is cant and claptrap, less important for what it says than what it avoids.
There’s an old Twitter joke, or meme, called “Fellow White People.” It plays off how Jews in the media will call themselves “white” when it’s time to browbeat the goyim about racism, xenophobia, whatever. But when they want to talk mainly amongst themselves, and bang on about how they’re a special minority—well then! White people are the other, the enemy. (more…)