Iain Duncan Smith

A Rotting Carcass Called Europe

GSTAAD—Blah, blah, blah! I’ve heard it all before. We are all swivel-eyed fanatics, racists, and right-wing extremists. And we’re also bigots because we believe in Jesus Christ. Today is my name day, the Day of ...

Engaging the Hermit Kingdom

Writing about an international crisis a couple of days before publication risks making you look like a fool—okay, a bigger fool than usual. Politicians, of course, suffer likewise. In the first days of the Norway campaign ...

Cervena Lhota, Bohemia

The War on Manners

NEW YORK—Prince Pavlos, heir to the Greek throne, turned 55 recently, and I threw a small dinner for him. Pavlos is a hell of a prince, father, husband, and businessman. He’s tall, good-looking, a gent in every way, ...

Jeremy Corbyn and the Politics of Conspiracy

We live in an era where fake news is real, and real news is fake. A recent furor in the U.K. concerned the involvement of Cambridge Analytica—President Trump’s favorite data jockeys—on the Leave side of the E.U. ...

Congo

A Lady and Ali

Marion, Baroness Lambert, was hit and killed by a London bus last month while shopping on Oxford Street, a cruel irony if there ever was one. “At least a Bentley,” was the way Steven Aronson, the writer, put it. ...

Tweet Away, Ye Morons

FORT WORTH, TEXAS—To the best state in the Union for the annual John Randolph Club meeting of true conservatives, hip, hip. No posturing peacocks spouting gibberish learned at university diversity courses here, but witty, ...

We Gotta Get Out of That Place

With Egypt's melodramatic implosion, many Americans are asking, "€œWhat has this got to do with us?"€ The short answer: everything. We propped up Mubarak because he's good for Israel, yet most Egyptians want Israel ...

Sir Christopher Lee

Absinthe Minded

Last Wednesday, June 24, Pugs held a luncheon in honor of our first member to depart for the Elysian Fields, or that large CinemaScope screen up above, Sir Christopher Lee, age 93. Pugs club is now back to 19 members, the ...

Emperor Nero

Sub-Nero

NEW YORK—I haven’t felt such shirt-dripping, mind-clogging wet heat since Saigon back in 1971. The Bagel is a steam bath, with lots of very ugly people walking around in stages of undress that would have once upon a ...

Darkness at Dune: The Nightmare of Martha’s Vineyard

News reports about the hardships endured by the Venezuelan illegal immigrants sent by Gov. Ron DeSantis to Martha's Vineyard are hard to hear. One "migrant" told The New York Times that he felt "betrayed" because he didn't ...

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, circa 1933

The Week That Perished

The Week’s Most Defining, Refining, and Auld Lang Syne-ing Headlines BONNIE AND CLOD In 2019, while promoting her “black Bonnie and Clyde” movie Queen & Slim, Greek-Jewish-Jamaican filmmaker Melina Matsoukas ...

Bad Medicine

Speaking before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the embattled ex-CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, Martin Shkreli, defended his choice to increase the price of an HIV-fighting drug the best way he knew ...

Did ‘The Great Society’ Ruin Society?

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it.” Thus did Mitt Romney supposedly commit the gaffe of the month—for we are not to speak of ...

Jean Bedel Bokassa

After the “Palefaces”

If you have a heart in Africa it’s probably not a good idea to read Martin Meredith’s State of Africa because if you do, it will, in all likelihood, break it. In it, he covers, in gory detail, what has happened on the ...

Chuck Hagel

Is Hagel out of the Mainstream?

“Chuck Hagel is out of the mainstream of thinking ... on most issues regarding foreign policy,” says GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham. Neocon William Kristol concurs: Hagel is “out on the fringes.” But ...

Mickey Mantle

Flying High & Landing Low

NUEVA YORK–The dateline is in Spanish because I have yet to hear any English spoken here in the Bagel, and I landed in some style more than 24 hours ago. Never mind. Flying at 47,000 feet at close to 500 knots per hour on ...

Holy Smoke

(The article in its original Spanish immediately follows.) The great tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano was once asked by a journalist: “Maestro, why do you smoke so many cigars?” To this impertinence Di Stefano responded with ...

Happy Happy Meals Day, Mein Führer!

The third week of April, as always, sees two of the most significant red-letter days of the year—National McDonald’s Day, on 15 April, and the birthday of Adolf Hitler, on 20 April. As usual, I celebrated by heading ...

The Death of Music by the Spirit of Government Subsidies

Clearly something went horribly wrong with classical music in or shortly after 1945, something which left the old guard blissfully unaffected, yet which was almost bound to demoralize creators still in their youth. ...

William Barr

They’ve Learned Nothing and Forgotten Nothing

Bill Barr, two-time attorney general and one of approximately 2.5 members of the Trump administration to leave with his reputation intact, has also written one of only two books about that administration worth reading, "One ...

Sam Bankman-Fried

Hair-Brained Schemes

Thank God I don’t understand cryptocurrency, otherwise I should have lost all my money ages ago, and probably my house into the bargain. I do know one or two people who made a lot of money from Bitcoin in the early days, ...

Bernard-Henri Lévy

More Pie for Monsieur Lévy

About fifteen years ago I received a very polite letter from Belgium asking me to list three of the most pompous and self-important people in the UK. It came with a self-addressed return envelope and stamp. The writer was ...

Jerusalem

Century of Turmoil

A cease-fire in Syria brokered by the USA and Russia may hold for a bit, or it may have been thoroughly broken by the time you read this. Any optimism has to be tempered in the light of experience. The Middle East has been ...

Sir Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard: Baffling the Innocent Since 1966

Tom Stoppard's remarkable career stands as a puzzling rebuke to cynicism about show biz. Sure, audience-pandering, trend-surfing, and propagandizing can explain the vast majority of what the entertainment industry sets ...


Sign Up to Receive Our Latest Updates!