Thursday

Alastair Smart

A violent ultimatum ended Giacometti’s brief flirtation with Marlene Dietrich

Those with long enough memories may remember Desmond Morris as the presenter of the hit ITV children’s programme of Zoo Time in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Or perhaps as the author of the 1968 bestseller The Naked Ape, in which he argued that, beneath our sophisticated veneer, humans are nothing more than primates. Now aged 90, he has written an uproariously funny book on the ostensibly unlikely subject of the Surrealists. I say ‘ostensibly’ because, before becoming a successful zoologist, Morris was actually a painter and even had a joint exhibition in London with Joan Miró. In The Lives of the Surrealists he takes on the role of a latter-day Vasari, penning mini-biographies of 32 artists who were associated with Surrealism.

Mike Jackson

The Battle of Arnhem wasn’t doomed from the start. It might even have been a risk worth taking

In the high summer of 1944 the Allies achieved their major victory in Normandy with the closing of the German pocket centred on Falaise. By the end of August, Paris had been liberated, and the Wehrmacht was apparently in full flight; Brussels fell to the Allies in early September. For many, the end of the war in Europe was in sight — perhaps by Christmas that year. But Allied success brought serious logistical problems: supplies were still having to be landed on the Normandy beaches and transported forward along increasingly distant lines of communication.

A.N. Wilson

The stubborn old Hanoverians saw new Gunpowder Plots everywhere

Once won, rights and freedoms are taken for granted. We all find it difficult to imagine life before the Married Women’s Property Act, when everything belonging to a wife — goods, chattels, children — automatically became the sole property of her husband. Those born since the 1960s can’t really envisage what it was like for practising homosexuals in those days. By a similar token, the mind can scarcely take in the fact that in Penal times, Catholics could not buy or sell land; or that it was an imprisonable offence for Catholics to run a school. It was a legal offence to dress as a monk or a nun out of doors.

George Mccoy

Why do powerful men love to be spanked?

Spanking is back in the news. Le vice anglais was meant to be a dying art — a vestige of a time when men were more repressed, but it’s recently become clear that British men enjoy a thrashing just as much as they ever did. In the past few weeks a London barrister, Robert Jones, has claimed he was unfairly dismissed after a consensual spanking session with a junior worker, while up north a ‘dungeon master’ called Shaun O’Driscoll, who has thrashed diplomats and a duke, gave evidence at Bolton Crown Court. Then there’s the big one: the claims by the erotic actress Stormy Daniels that she spanked Donald Trump with a rolled-up copy of Time magazine that had his face on the cover. Why do powerful men like to be spanked?

Wednesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Could John Bolton cost Trump his Nobel Peace Prize?

My, my, my. North Korea is in a snit over National Security Adviser John Bolton who urged it to follow the Libya model of total denuclearization. Everyone knows how that ended. The North declared yesterday that it finds Bolton “repugnant,” a sentiment that is actually widely shared around the world, and that it wants an end to the “ruckus” surrounding the talks. Indeed Pyongyang is threatening to blowup the summit talks altogether. Will President Trump, who has been childishly eager to meet Kim Jong-un and land a prized photo op, realize that there is something wrong with this picture? Trump is being outmanoeuvred both by the North – and by his own adviser. By invoking Libya, Bolton pretty much ensured that Pyongyang would retaliate. And so it has.

John R. MacArthur

Why I’ll miss my friend Tom Wolfe

To some, Tom Wolfe’s death might seem a greater loss for readers on the right wing of American culture and politics, since he viewed himself as a conservative, very much in keeping with his upbringing in the Richmond, Virginia, of the 1930s and 1940s. His gentleman’s manners and soft-spoken demeanour recalled another era — a class-defined and racially segregated world of courtliness and formal collars. Wolfe famously picked on liberal targets throughout his remarkable career: his most savage satires addressed the pretensions of leftish icons from Leonard Bernstein to, most recently, Noam Chomsky.

Tuesday

Tom Ball

Why Christopher Steele should spill the beans

Lawyers representing the ex-spook-turned-private-investigator Christopher Steele were in action yesterday at London’s High Court. In a rather convoluted turn of events, BuzzFeed, who published Steele’s leaked dossier on links relating to Trump and Moscow, is now seeking to question the author “on the dossier as a whole” because of the document’s importance in the “public’s understanding of the ongoing federal investigations”. In other words, BuzzFeed wants Steele to spill the beans on some of his claims. And they’re right. Steele’s dossier is one of the keystones of the Mueller investigation.

William Cash

Tom Wolfe 1931-2018

Tom Wolfe has died at the age of 87. In 1998, William Cash interviewed the great author for The Spectator: Yes, Tom Wolfe does own one of those 12-room Upper East Side apartments, as he wrote in Bonfire of the Vanities, 'the mere thought of which ignites flames of greed and covetousness under people all over New York, and for that matter, the world'. Contrary to reports in the British press, however, the 68-year-old dandy New Journalist, self-styled Zola of Our Times, does not resemble Bela Lugosi with 'cracked lips' and the blood sucked from a 'ghastly livid-white' face. Although he does wear a cape at night and has rarely been seen out in public in the last year, he looked extremely well in his whipped ice-cream suit.

Curt Mills

John Bolton really is in charge

The opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem was nothing short of a dark Mass. A ceremony that should have marked the monumental achievement of the Jewish people was instead consecrated in blood. Seated courtside was the man who perhaps more than any other made the embassy happen: Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate. Back in Washington, his man in the White House, John Bolton, continued at work, as the administration exclusively faulted Hamas for the carnage in Gaza.I was the first to report, in January, that Bolton was on his way to becoming national security advisor.

Daniel DePetris

Will Trump end the Mueller inquiry or will the Mueller inquiry end Trump?

May 17, 2017 started out as any other day in Donald Trump’s Washington. Men and women in suits with briefcases walked into work, ready to meet clients or do business. The day, however, proved to be the very beginning of Trump’s troubles, with the appointment of a special counsel to look into allegations of collusion between the president’s campaign and Russian operatives in the Kremlin. The White House, like everybody else in the country, was caught off guard; Trump found out about the Justice Department’s decision when he was meeting with candidates for FBI Director (Trump threw James Comey out of the building a week earlier). As one administration official told CNN at the time: "It's still sinking in. We were told about it. Not asked about it.

Monday

Kelly Jane Torrance

Does Mike Pompeo really think he can cut a good deal with North Korea?

It’s a busy time for America’s top diplomat, and perhaps the stress is getting to him. That’s one explanation, anyway, for some of the things uttered by Mike Pompeo over the last week.His most glaring goof came last Tuesday, as he spoke to reporters on board a flight to Japan. The secretary of state was briefing them on the upcoming meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un and said that the administration had started “to put some outlines around the substance of the agenda for the summit between the president and Chairman Un.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Is Trump preparing to sell out South Korea?

Maybe President Trump has finally given up on his cherished dream of Vladimir Putin as his new best friend. It seems that Kim Jong-un is supplanting him in his affections. Even as Trump tries to up the ante with Iran, his top officials are playing kissy-face with North Korea. Fears are swirling in Washington that in his desperation for a grand bargain, Trump may end up following a policy of appeasement toward the North with Singapore as the new Munich. It may not be long before Trump returns from Singapore brandishing a piece of paper, or at least issues a tweet, declaring “peace for our time.

Saturday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump is on a roll. But is it all artifice?

On June 12 Donald Trump will meet Kim Jong-un in Singapore. Trump is ebullient. “World Peace” is what he will seek, according his Twitter account. Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is sounding a more cautious note: “We hope this meeting will advance prospects for peace in the Korean Peninsula." Trump’s euphoric tone is more reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson than the America First rodomontade that he was peddling to his followers during the 2016 campaign. It’s prompting a volte-face in Washington, not the first Trump has created. Hawks are becoming doves and doves hawks. Conservatives are talking peace, love and understanding. Liberals are fretting that Trump will give away the store to the North.

Dominic Green

Review: Racer and the Jailbird. Terrible name, great film

Racer and the Jailbird is a terrible name for a film. It sounds like an unsolicited tribute to that sorrily misbegotten Seventies’ genre, the action-comedy buddy movie—like Freebie and the Bean (1974) or Smokey and the Bandit (1977). But it is not. Nor, though the trailers for Racer and the Jailbird misrepresent it as such, is it a sexed-up, souped-up heist movie for knuckleheads and chuckleheads, like Gone in Sixty Seconds or Baby Driver, but with sexy Europeans instead of Nicholas Cage looking like he’s been shot with an elephant tranquilizer, and then put in someone else’s dentures because he’s still a bit woozy. Racer and the Jailbird is none of these things, probably because it isn’t really Racer and the Jailbird at all.

Friday

Matt McDonald

Ben Shapiro, the child prodigy gone right

Liberty University, Jerry Falwell’s Evangelical Christian finishing school, gathers three times a week for “convocation”, a worship service with guest speakers from all backgrounds. Attendance is mandatory, but students say the man delivering today’s sermon would have filled the 8,000-capacity venue regardless. Because today, the Ben Shapiro show has come to Liberty. A lot of people don’t like Shapiro. His critics on the right dislike him even more than his critics on the left - “the alt-right think I’m a cuck Jew,” he tells his podcast audience. A touch of jealousy there, perhaps – Shapiro may be a bit soft for many of his rivals on the internet. What really hurts, however, is that he’s a bigger deal than all of them now. And his fans worship him.

ben shapiro liberty
Linden Kemkaran

What Donald Trump can teach us about dealing with bullies

I’ve been watching with interest the way Donald Trump deals with ‘awkward’ folk. He doesn’t muck about, that much is clear, and you know what? It works. He’s threatened to take the trade war to China, he’s vowed to “rain down fire and fury, the like of which the world has never seen” on North Korea, and this week he’s basically told Iran it can ‘do one’ over its nuclear deal. Each time he makes one of his ‘my way or the high way’ statements, the world holds its breath. The news media goes into overdrive on what it might mean, what exactly the target of Trump’s venom may do in retaliation and then…nothing.

Daniel McCarthy

John McCain is right about Gina Haspel

John McCain is a victim of hypocrisy. His allies in Washington and admirers in the national media praise him as the conscience of the nation, even as they betray him in his last desperate battle against the normalisation of torture. After a White House communications staffer, Kelly Sadler, joked that McCain’s views don’t matter because “he’s dying anyway,” the senator’s pretend friends called for her firing. Her tasteless joke, badly received even among colleagues, provoked a degree of outrage from wonks and commentators unmatched by any such umbrage at the nomination of a woman implicated in torture and the destruction of evidence to head the CIA. For elite Washington, disrespectful words are worse than waterboarding.

Thursday

Rick Wilson

America is in the middle of a Russian influence campaign – not at the end

Donald Trump's longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen is playing a starring role in a riveting drama featuring the President, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Putin-connected oligarchs, shady vory v zakone-adjacent moneymen, and American and Russian corporations seeking influence with the Trump Administration. For Americans, this is a new lurid political drama, but it’s one London has seen up close for two decades. It’s the story of the inevitable consequences that result when Russian money, influence and corruption slither up on Western shores.

Madeleine Kearns

Review: My Fair Lady

Draggle-tailed guttersnipe. Squashed cabbage leaf. Bilious pigeon. These are some of the insults hurled at Eliza Doolittle by Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. The musical is undergoing a Broadway revival this season, the first in 25 years, with Lincoln Center Theatre’s production directed by Bartlett Sher. Sexual politics may be under the spotlight, in keeping with Lerner and Loewe’s original, yet it's the British class system takes centre stage. Set in London, at the turn of the 20th century, My Fair Lady is the story of a flower-selling street urchin, Eliza Doolittle, as she becomes the willing subject of a social experiment conducted by ‘speech scientist’ Henry Higgins. It’s the tale of a self-made woman.

Dominic Green

Europe’s leaders need Trump more than they wish to admit

America, meet your European allies in the effort to contain Iran: Emmanuel Macron of France, Theresa May of Britain, and Angela Merkel of Germany. Think of them as the Three M’s. Or perhaps the Three Wise Monkeys. Or even, as the Wise Monkeys are sometimes known, and would probably prefer to be called, the Three Mystic Apes. For each of these three European leaders is affecting a posture of simian ignorance about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and presenting this unwillingness to accept reality as philosophical wisdom.Emmanuel Macron sees no evil in the Iranian regime’s anti-Western, terrorist-sponsoring Islamist millenarianism, because global security must come second to getting the French economy into gear.