I remember when I was living in Flambertin des Creppieres, a small hamlet west of Paris with an admittedly extremely pretentious name, and listening to two butchers arguing about Camus. They both had obviously read him, but it was their evocation of other writers whom they compared him to which ...

Imus is an unpleasant fellow—one could never take him to a gentleman’s club, for example—but he didn’t say anything black radio jockeys don’t say every day about us whites. And it was meant, after all, to be a joke. Ethnic jokes have all but disappeared from the mass media due to ...

Fictitious enterprises are the heart and soul of low journalism, and no one is lower in my opinion than Lloyd Grove. Just that week I had launched The American Conservative magazine, so Grove needed to put a kibosh to it with an anti-Semitic slur against me. I vowed to kick him in the ass the next ...

The seizure of the British Royal Marines and sailors by Iran was always a no brainer. To Iran, Tony Blair is a lame duck, and the British people believe in their government as much as the Americans believed that Bill Clinton did not have sex with that woman. Few Brits accepted their Government’s ...

In this week's New Yorker Philip Gourevitch takes a shot at Robert Mugabe, one of the leading psychopathic monsters among the rest of the crooks and murderers who lead the Dark Continent. He writes that the South African honcho, Thabo Mbeki and his gang have dishonored themselves by failing to ...

Last week I spent some days in Washington, D.C. for a conference organized by Fran Griffin at the National Press Club. The subject was Sam Francis, and his terrific book, Shots Fired, about America’s culture wars. Alas, Sam Francis passed away two years ...

Back in the old country we've been making jokes about the Persians since 480 B.C. But we also like them because they made heroes out of us Greeks. We only lost once to them, in Thermopylae in 480 B.C., but they were 400,000 of them and 300 of ...

Dodi was not sleeping with Diana, hence if she were pregnant at the time of her death, it would have been a far greater story than it was. It would have been the second Immaculate ...

The neocons have their own axe to grind -- make the Middle East safe for Greater Israel -- but the West does not necessarily follow an Eretz Israel agenda. Or should not, in any case. It is strange that people like Bush and Blair have not caught on all these years. The more we mix up in their ...

Dripping with malice, envy and venom, hacks are having the time of their life as Conrad Black goes to trial in Chicago, a city known for its smiling wallet-lifters and corrupt public officials. Not since Fat Bob Maxwell took a dive into the Med back in 1991 have those holier than thou members of ...