The English are in love with murder. From The Woman in White and The Hound of the Baskervilles to Lord Peter Wimsey and Hercule Poirot, the mid-market English have long reveled in tales that are simultaneously sanguinary and strangely ...

Politicians, especially those who climbed to the top, should disappear when they leave office. Deprived of spokesmen and advisors, they are bound to reveal character flaws they concealed while selling themselves to the electorate and ...

The great reactionary novelist Evelyn Waugh owned a country house in Combe Florey, southwest England. Among the furnishings was a set of three paintings under the collective title The Pleasures of Travel: 1751, 1851, 1951. The first ...

The guests were singing maudlin folksongs trying to drown out the TV's noxious noises. Live Aid had been going on apparently forever and would go on for weary hours more, and even at a whiskey-sodden wedding reception it seemed no one ...

There is an awful lot of blowzy thought swirling around the proposed mosque to be raised two blocks from ground zero in lower Manhattan. Frankly, I doubt that at any other time in our history such a debate would be taking place. People ...

It is that time of year when we depart for summer vacation. We head for the woods and mountains. Unless we planned to visit the Gulf, we head for the beach. Oh, what the hell. Even if we planned to visit the Gulf, let us head for the ...

My friend Andrew Roberts has inherited the title of “historian of the English-speaking people” from Winston Churchill. Churchill wrote his four-volume history up to 1900. Roberts took up the story from there and has written ...

Well, well, well, now it appears that even the Soviet—strike that!—Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, is afflicted by the general mediocrity of the moment. There was never any reason to doubt that the Soviet grasp of ...

“If you have nothing else, you have your principles,” Lady Thatcher told me when things were pretty tough at The American Spectator in the late 1990s. Sharks were circling the ship, and there was blood in the water; I was ...

It was precisely Feb. 5, 2009, when I broke my self-imposed rule. It was not a very old rule, but it was serious. I had told myself that I would not criticize the new president of the United States, Barack Obama—at least not for a ...

A few days after the failed attempt of a Pakistani-born naturalized American citizen to blow Times Square sky high, I bravely made my way through the returning throng of tourists and street vendors to take a look. By my calculation, had ...

As I read the news about this Pakistani jackal who admits to planning a cowardly assault on hundreds of innocent people in New York’s Times Square, a thought that occurs to me is, how endlessly interesting history is. Often things ...