Jay Nordlinger
Encore! Encore!
Encores are an adornment to concert life — like a dessert, completing a meal, or an after-dinner mint
Varsity Matchless
University Challenge is a novel delight for an American
Thanks, Ma
The great cellist Yo-Yo Ma at 60 is still phenomenal
The Write Stuff
Is it ever worth the trouble reading journalism whose politics you fundamentally disagree with?
Privileged Outsider
The cult of Benjamin Britten lives on in Paul Kildea’s new biography, painting the composer as a perennial victim
Mazower’s New World Order
Reading Mark Mazower is like being lectured by the best left-wing lecturer you’ll ever have: he is brilliant but tiresome
A New Yorker Writes
Anthony Daniels has said he likes living in foreign countries. He has lived in several of them. For one thing, a foreign country’s problems are not your own problems — your own country’s. You can view them with a certain detachment. It may be too bad that Italy has gone childless, let’s say. But what really churns your gut is the barbarisation of Birmingham.
Do you know the definition of minor surgery? Surgery someone else is having.
I don’t live in Britain, but I have become addicted to the British press. I turn to it for information and amusement, yes. But also for something like comfort. As an American political journalist, I am enmeshed in my own country’s problems, and long have been. Sometimes these problems are bitter in one’s mouth. My cousins, the British, provide relief.
New York: A ‘Post-racial’ American vs an Old Coot
‘The Obama campaign will be touted as “historic,” and how do you run against history?’
Majority rule; minority rights
It is folly to treat UK race relations as totally divorced from the rest of human experience. We need to look at the larger global picture
American revolutions: Rewriting the language of the unheard
‘Dissenting viewpoints — for example, the belief that America is not an intrinsically racist country—are shunned as further proof of racist pathologies’
The favourites
From Piers Gaveston onwards, controversial courtiers have a long history in British politics.How unusual is Dominic Cummings?