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The papers this morning were full of the revelation in a BBC documentary that the Queen had had a hissy fit and stormed out of a photo-shoot with the photographer Annie Leibowitz. As the Times reported: The Queen offered a rare, public display of displeasure when she sat for Leibovitz, who is famed for her Vanity Fair photographs of stars such as a pregnant Demi Moore in the nude. A camera crew was invited to film the encounter for a fly-on-the-wall BBC One series, A Year with the Queen, made by the production company behind Wife Swap. The portrait was...

The Lawrence Journal-World (Kansas) has an account of a recent speaking engagement by DNC chairman Howard Dean. He spoke harmlessly enough at Lawrence's Liberty Hall, but he got a little more outrageous at a fundraiser held in the backyard of residents John and Nancy Hiebert. As he laid into conservatives with greater audacity than in his Liberty Hall speech, he concluded by saying, "This is a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good." The quote stops short of directly calling Republicans evil, but the implication is very explicit. When Kansas Republican Party executive director Derrick Sontag was told...

NEW YORK -- Susan Sontag died the same week as a tsunami in south Asia killed over a hundred thousand people. There's no logical connection between these two events. Even though Sontag titled one of her books Regarding the Pain of Others, nothing of substance is to be learned by their juxtaposition except to remark that, when free association counts as intellectual work, as it did in Sontag's world, intimations of significance can always be found. After Sontag published as essay last year in the New York Times about the Abu Ghraib scandal in which she compared prisoner abuse by...

HOW TO WRITE A SUSAN SONTAG OBITUARY  By Michelle Malkin   ·   December 29, 2004 11:25 AM Washington Times editor Stacy McCain sends along his newspaper's Susan Sontag obit, which begins: Novelist, radical Susan Sontag, 71, dies in New York From combined dispatchesSusan Sontag, a critic, novelist and essayist who blamed America for the September 11 terror attacks and once declared that "the white race is the cancer of human history," died in New York yesterday at age 71.  Read the rest here. And then compare it with the rest of the mainstream media's deifications: A Rigorous Intellectual Dressed in...

Susan Sontag's death brings grief and sadness to all those who were close to her and is thus a very sad occasion. It is only fitting to begin even this anti-eulogy with a proper expression of condolences to those stricken by her passage from the terrestrial vail of tears. So for those who loved Susan Sontag, I hope they find solace in their grief. What looms sadder and more grievous than the attenuation of her lifespan is the meaning Susan Sontag gave to her life. If John Paul Sartre speaks the truth and we really become the summation of all...

Last Updated: Tuesday, 28 December, 2004, 23:46 GMT Susan Sontag dies: Your tributes Susan Sontag, the celebrated American author, has died aged 71. Her work included the best selling historical novel The Volcano Lover and the essays On Photography and Illness as Metaphor. The feminist writer died in New York after suffering from leukaemia for some time. Send us your memories of Susan Sontag using the form on the right. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Derrida and Sontag, that's too big of a loss for one year. And I am sad to say, I don't see a hopeful new generation to replace such geniuses......

NEW YORK -- Susan Sontag, the author, activist and self-defined "zealot of seriousness" whose voracious mind and provocative prose made her a leading intellectual of the past half century, died Tuesday. She was 71. Sontag died Tuesday morning, officials at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center said. She had been treated for breast cancer in the 1970s. Sontag called herself a "besotted aesthete," an "obsessed moralist" and a "zealot of seriousness."

Why Are We In Kosovo? It's complicated, but not that complicated. There is such a thing as a just war. The other day a friend from home, New York, called me in Bari -- where I am living for a couple of months -- to ask whether I am all right and inquired in passing whether I can hear sounds of the bombing. I reassured her that not only could I not hear the bombs dropping on Belgrade and Novi Sad and Pristina from downtown Bari, but even the planes taking off from the nearby NATO base of Gioia del...

A Disturbing Letter from a Saudi By David Horowitz FrontPageMagazine.com | March 15, 2002 I RECEIVED the following email from someone describing himself as a "Saudi Citizen." I have no way of knowing whether it is authentic, but its particulars seem accurate to me and I invite readers of FrontPage to comment. --David Horowitz *** Message from a Saudi Citizen Do not forget that radical Islam is more pervasive in the Arab world than Christianity is in the West. There is no "dissent" or "constructive engagement". The goal of Islam is to destroy anything or anyone that is not Islam....