Call me old-fashioned and I will thank you for the compliment. Call me a fool for rosy nostalgia and more thanks will be in order. Yes, Fred and Ginger are my favorite movie couple, and last year while recuperating from a broken leg, I watched four of their movies back-to-back shown on Turner ...
Here we go again, another Christmas issue and it seems only two weeks ago that I filed for the last one. This is a very happy time of year: parties galore, lots of love for our fellow man, and happiness all around. Mind you, there is an old calypso ditty that tells one, “If you want to be happy ...
It had the same effect on them that a man sitting in a front-row seat and sucking a lemon has on the lead flutist performing a Mozart concert. “Them,” needless to say, are the “elites,” a misnomer if there ever was one for the rabble that is Hollywood types, engaged ladies who lunch, cheap ...
NEW YORK CITY—Richard Spencer made the front page of the NY Times two days in a row last week, as well as a half-page report on the third day. For any of you who have never heard of him—and very few have—he is described by the mendacious Times as the leader of the “white nationalist ...
Even by modern, cataclysmically hysterical standards, the postelection histrionics by the losers take the proverbial cake. Poor Graydon Carter, the Vanity Fair honcho. He wrote things about the Donald I would not dream of writing about an African-American hero like O.J. Simpson. I advise my friend ...
NEW YORK—If only my friendly wordsmith Jeremy Clarke had been with me, what fun he’d have had with the ungallant thing I did last week. Jeremy’s writing thrives on such occasions, but alas, he’s in the land of cheese and impressionism. I had just finished lunch with my friend Alex Sepkus, a ...
NEW YORK—The only thing worse than a sore loser, I suppose, is a sore winner, but thank God we don’t run into too many of those. Thirty years ago The Spectator and I lost a libel case that cost the then proprietor and yours truly a small fortune, and as it turned out, after the plaintiff had ...
Americans have been to the polls. Everything is over but the shouting — by the loser, that is: honest Hil. I predicted that the best Trump could have hoped for was winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College but I got it wrong: the Donald has triumphed. An underfunded campaign — ...
American writers are on a roll. Bob Dylan wins the Nobel in Literature (for backward children), and Paul Beatty the Man Booker Prize, the first American to do so because this was the first year Americans were eligible for the award. (Only Brits were considered until this year.) Beatty was the ...
Sixty years ago this week all hell broke loose: Soviet tanks rumbled into Budapest and put down a nationalist uprising in a very bloody manner. Down south, Anglo-French paratroopers jumped into the Sinai and in cahoots with the Israelis took over the Suez Canal in a last gasp of colonialism by the ...
