Exactly fifty years ago last month I was lolling by the pool of the St. Georges Hotel in Beirut surrounded by bikini-clad women of uncertain virtue, spooks, pimps, journalists, ...

Now that academics have abandoned BC (Before Christ) for BCE (Before the Common Era), though without explaining for whom or to what the Era is Common, the initials BC are ...

There comes a time in life when one is more interested in the past than in the future. In my case, I reached it very early: I cannot remember a time when the past was not more ...

The “Islamic Renaissance” that Sultan Erdogan campaigns for today has little to do with what the Christian world experienced centuries ago. Then, Europe unearthed the beauty ...

I have never been quite able to make up my mind whether there is no new thing under the sun or whether we live in completely unprecedented times. When we look at events close up ...

When indolence becomes intolerable, remembrances of things past become a lifesaver. Charles Moore’s recent Spectator notes also helped; for example, his stories about the ...

As this week’s column will run on the final day of the year, I thought I’d break format and do something a little different. People often ask me, “Dave, where do you get ...

Another year, another 365 days of walking, talking human headaches. Sometimes I don’t know why I simply don’t look away from it all—and then, when I can’t come up with an ...

War is fought on two fronts: the battlefield and the mind. Whereas superior strategy and firepower wins it on the battlefield, the war for the mind is won by successfully ...

The only true love is summer love, as the saying by Giacomo Casanova goes. Actually it’s mine, as the Venetian was too slick to differentiate between love seasons. The reason I ...

Pedants delight in error, not in truth, and fall upon it like scavengers on a carcass. I have books, pre-owned—or even pre-loved, as dealers in secondhand objects are now ...

Over Memorial Day weekend, some shocking news broke about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. David Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning King biographer, came across some new details about ...

Another year has passed. Let us shove it off the cliff and watch its brains get bashed to paste on the rocks as it falls. Let seagulls peck at its flesh on the wet, cold sand ...

Saturday, in Pittsburgh, a Sabbath celebration at the Tree of Life synagogue became the site of the largest mass murder of Jews in U.S. history. Eleven worshippers were killed by ...

In Chekhov’s The Seagull, there is a character called Trigorin. He is a writer (a good writer, he thinks his epitaph will say, but not as good as Turgenev) who has always a ...

Bonjour, mes amis! Fifty years ago this month I was living in Paris and life was, shall we say, grand. Back then there was nothing like Paris in the spring and early summer, with ...