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Let's say a fire breaks out at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris at the start of Holy Week, and just after two of the city's other most prominent houses of worship - St Sulpice and the Basilica of St Denis - have been attacked and vandalized. Well, I think we can all confidently say as the first flames are beginning to lick the ceiling that it's undoubtedly an accident. Cigarette butt. Or maybe computer glitch. Probably just an overheated smart phone. We don't need to get in there and sift through the debris. We can just announce it. On the...

At midnight on December 31st 1999, how did the world's only superpower celebrate the passing of the soi-disant millennium and a thousand years of cultural inheritance? Shakespeare? No. Mozart? Not a chance. Instead, Bill Clinton, the Lounge-Lizard-In-Chief, turned up at the Lincoln Memorial to listen to Tom Jones crank out well-loved favorites like "It's Not Unusual" - which, by happy coincidence, was also the President's defense to Paula Jones' allegations about the curvature of his, ah, "distinguishing characteristics". Millennia come and go, and Clinton is stooped and aged now, but the indestructible Welsh boyo is still on stage 250 nights...

The moronization of society proceeds apace. As we mentioned on the show, a bigshot New York Times correspondent thinks that playing "Edelweiss" at the White House is some kind of Nazi dog-whistle to Trump supporters. It is tragic and profound the way even small artifacts of our inheritance get trashed in these witless arguments, so, if you want to know the real story of the very last song in the Oscar Hammerstein catalogue, here's what I had to say a couple of years back: Not long after Rodgers & Hammerstein wrote the song, Theodore Bikel was leaving the theatre when...

The real problem, in America, Britain, Canada, Oz, NZ, is not the left, who know what they want and are serious about getting it, but the pansy right. It's easy to mock AOC and Justin and Jacinta Ardern, but all they're doing is sailing full steam ahead for their desired utopia. The right, who profess to disdain the final destination, nevertheless follow along, albeit at a more desultory rate of knots. We see this routinely in their urge to "distance" themselves: In Washington, as I mentioned the other day, House Republicans ostentatiously distanced themselves from their colleague Steve King, because...

In George Lucas' best film - no, not Star Wars Episode 12: The Force Awakens the Empire's Return of the Revenge of the Awakening of the Force, but American Graffiti - there's a scene where young Harrison Ford and young Cindy Williams are sitting sullenly in his '55 Chevy during a rather awkward moment in their relationship. Ford suggested to Lucas that it might be a good idea for him to serenade her in a somewhat sardonic fashion. The director liked the idea, and they tried the scene with a couple of Everly Brothers tunes (all the music in the...

It's April 1st, and this was supposed to be the first business day of a post-EU United Kingdom, with planes dropping from the skies, Mars Bars melting in your hand, and doughty Irishmen of north and south paralyzed in permanent immobility by the psychological terrors of an invisible Berlin Wall that had mysteriously arisen overnight across sleepy country lanes in Killeen. Instead, thanks to Theresa ("Brexit means Brexit") May, Britain wakes up and finds itself still in the EU. It turns out Brexit doesn't mean Brexit, but, if you give 'em a couple more weeks or months or years, the...

I'm Gonna Miss You on Valentine's Day When I see all the young lovers together I'm Gonna Miss You on Washington's Birthday 'Cause I told a lie and I lost you I'm gonna feel like an April Fool When April first is due... I don't suppose one in a gazillion folks knows the above song. Mel Tormé wrote it, and you get the gist pretty quickly: he's gonna miss you on Valentine's Day, Groundhog Day, Ramadan, Take Your Daughter To Work Day, you name it. The relationship of February 14th to romance is obvious, Washington's Birthday less so, but the...

Asked about the difference between American and British comedy, Eric Morecambe replied that in America they had funny lines but no funny men. I sort of know what he means: A funny man is someone an audience is happy to hang out with even when the funny lines are thin on the ground. Likeability comes into it, but also the ability to disguise the comedian's desperate desire to be liked - which I recall talking about in one of the many pre-interviews I did for the tour dates with Dennis Miller. But, for a while, my favorite Hollywood funny man...

My book Lights Out takes its title from a famous observation by Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, as he looked out of his window at London at dusk on the eve of the Great War: The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. Lights Out is about free speech (you can order personally autographed copies here), and thus relevant to my seven-year battle against the Big Climate enforcers. But let us not forget that the warm-mongers literally want the lights out. At 8.30pm tonight in my corner of...

I have a lousy week ahead of me, a se'nnight of non-stop litigious cockwombling. Which, even if one has right on one's side, is draining and depressing. So I find myself in the mood for some low comedy, and, as it's "EU Talent Day" on Monday, I thought I'd feature a quintessentially American take on the EU's talents. Among this picture's distinctions is the fact that it's Matt Damon's finest hour. Well, okay, finest three minutes. But maybe that's what he should stick to. We'll get to that later, as we celebrate the many pleasures of EuroTrip, which demonstrates a...

Happy birthday to Batman, who made his debut eight decades ago in Detective Comics, issue number 27. It was dated May 1939, but actually hit newsstands in March that year. Batman made his screen debut in 1943 - see the somewhat saggy long underwear at right, and then took a two decade break till the campy TV series of the mid-Sixties. Another twenty years later he returned in a feature film by Tim Burton, and has been a fixture at the multiplex ever since. I was trying to recall whether I'd ever met anyone who's played Bruce Wayne, and to...

I've had the pleasure of appearing on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show. But, even if I hadn't, I would watch it. It is by far the most interesting show on cable news. (Don't take my word for it.) By definition, that world's a hamster wheel - let's go live to a press conference, a House vote, a court verdict, a car chase - and much of it doesn't matter a week later, never mind a year or a decade. But night after night Tucker uses the small details of the day to paint the big picture of our times -...

What did the picture editor of Look see in the Bronx teenager's photograph? A weeping city news vendor surrounded by front pages announcing the death of President Roosevelt — and the small, tenderly caught moment that humanizes great events. It got its sixteen-year-old snapper, Stanley Kubrick, a staff job at the magazine, and he never did anything like it again — unless you count the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in which the computer HAL, the picture's only really human character, gets dismantled in what's easily the most moving death scene in the director's oeuvre. Stanley Kubrick died...

...In the pithy summation of Terry Teachout, Alec Wilder "spent his life looking for cracks to fall through". Back in the days when we still had record stores, he didn't quite fit the pop bins or the classical bins or the jazz bins. Which is why, if you're hung up on categorization, it's easier to leave him out of the store altogether. As he himself acknowledged, his compositions "were gunned down by the jazz boys because they had a classical flavor, and they were gunned down by the classical boys because they had a jazz flavor." Still, discriminating persons at...

...Stanley Donen died a week ago, and...was the last surviving major director of the Golden Age, mainly because he was barely out of short pants when he started. His films include On The Town, Singin' In The Rain, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, Indiscreet, Charade and Two for the Road. He started out directing Sinatra, Astaire, Gene Kelly, Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, and hung in there long enough to direct Lionel Richie, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore (topless), and Michael Jackson (for a Jekyll & Hyde adaptation aborted after the child-molestation charges). And, speaking of the Oscars, the last magical moment...

White Tucker Carlson Guest Says African-Americans ‘Need to Move on’ From Slavery (Video) Tucker Carlson guest Mark Steyn offered his thoughts and slavery and the issue of reparations to the descendants of U.S. slaves, telling viewers of Carlson’s Fox News show Thursday that nobody living today knew anyone who had been a slave and that people just needed to move on from the whole issue. “Slavery was abolished a century and a half ago. Nobody alive today had a grandparent who was a slave and in that sense I think you reach a point where, you know, you need to...

These are strange times in America, with Andrew McCabe and the senior leadership of the FBI and Department of Justice living out their own Seven Days in May fantasy, except that in the Deputy Director's cut it's already halfway to Seven Years in May. We shall leave that disturbing convergence of Tinseltown and the Swamp for another day, but on this Presidents Day weekend I thought we'd take a look at the kind of president Hollywood lefties come up with when they're given free rein to design their ideal. There was a fashion for such films during the Clinton years,...

There was some modest activity yesterday in the Mann vs Steyn climate-change hockey-stick case, which will shortly be entering its eighth year. As that ludicrous fact testifies, it has been procedurally bollocksed by the District of Columbia courts, which is why it will almost certainly be headed to the Supreme Court. When it gets there, it will be the most consequential free-speech case since New York Times vs Sullivan fifty-five years ago. Lest you doubt that, consider yesterday's request by the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press and various other parties to file an amicus brief on the...

Two contrasting approaches to population growth: ~First, the American policy, per the Census Bureau: The Census Bureau is projecting that the population of the United States will hit 404 million by 2060, and nearly all of the net growth will be from immigrants and their families. A new analysis of the figures shows that of the 79 million more in 2060, 75 million will be legal and illegal immigrants and their families, a population the size of France and Belgium combined. Without immigration, according to the Census analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies, the U.S. population would increase by...

Michel Legrand died a fortnight ago, of sepsis after contracting a pulmonary infection. He was 86, which is a grand age, but he was very active and had a full concert schedule booked for the spring. So one resents somewhat, as I mentioned re Albert Finney yesterday, the randomness of fatal affliction in otherwise healthy old men. Sometimes with the advancing years a writer starts to sound written out - as if everything he has to say has already been said. Legrand didn't sound like that to me. My pal Jessica Martin was in his last show, Marguerite, in the...