What was the point of the Strategic Defence Review?

This weekend has not been a masterclass in political communications by the government. Selected morsels of the Strategic Defence Review were dropped over several days, concluding with an anodyne launch by the prime minister at BAE Systems in Govan. The result: the prime minister and the defence secretary contradicting each other on defence spending, a rightly furious tirade from the speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, for neglecting Parliament and an urgent question from the Opposition. They are not good at this.

It is plainly unacceptable that some journalists had sight of the full text of the SDR five hours before Members of Parliament could obtain copies. But is the 144-page review itself, emetically subtitled ‘Making Britain Safer: secure at home, strong abroad, the defence moment of a generation’ an actual ‘plan for transformation’, as Defence Secretary John Healey told the House of Commons?

Nae danger, as my Glaswegian grandmother would have said. There are a few provisos. The first stems from the review’s terms of reference, which were extraordinarily restrictive. Essentially, the reviewers were not able to consider the future of the nuclear deterrent; the pre-eminence of Nato in the UK’s defence policy planning; any aspect of military or financial assistance to Ukraine; the UK’s commitments in the Indo-Pacific, the Gulf and the Middle East; or significant examination of spending levels and requirements. The SDR was never going to be a radical reassessment of Britain’s place in the world.

The second consideration is the authorship and extent of editing of the review. The reviewers are reported to have submitted the last of several drafts to the Ministry of Defence in February or March. As it is now June, it is reasonable to assume that the original text has gone through a number of iterations since then, and it shows. The tone is uneven, veering from insightful analysis to the blindingly obvious, all of it overlaid with a characteristic lifeless, repetitive, sloganeering and simplistic Starmerese. ‘Defence should be ruthlessly focused on delivering the core digital platform for the warfighter’ is pure Keir.

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Then there is the barrage of jargon and formulaic phraseology which is the stock in trade of the Ministry of Defence: ‘step-change in lethality’, ‘a common set of foundational enablers’, ‘a force optimised for warfighting’. If this seems impenetrable to outsiders, it is, but all I can tell you is that this is an organisation which ‘abbreviates’ the commander of UK amphibious forces to ‘COMUKAMPHIBFOR’.

The SDR is not all bad. There is a reasonable assessment of the current geopolitical situation, a summary of the roles the armed forces should play and an endorsement of some of the organisational changes within the Ministry of Defence – known as ‘Defence Reform’ – which are already underway.

It also comments usefully on technological change and greater integration between different elements of the armed forces, and the creation of ‘the Integrated Force’, a Boris Johnson-era term championed in the 2021 Command Paper ‘Defence in a competitive age’. The SDR gives it a vaguely sinister Marxist spin when it notes ‘there is no end state for the Integrated Force: its design and capabilities… must continue to evolve’.

Force structure, capabilities, procurement and ethos are all present, but there are two striking and fundamental gaps: overarching purpose and budget. The first really means strategy. The review has little to say, and almost nothing new, about what role Britain should play in the world.

Given that Nato, the Indo-Pacific, the Gulf and the Middle East were immutable under the terms of reference, there was not much scope for the reviewers. Whoever defined one ‘strategic’ role as ‘shaping the global security environment in favour of the UK’s interests, supported by the prioritised use of all the levers available to it’ did not have his or her proudest day at the office. But there is no underlying purpose, no mission, no hierarchy of geopolitical goals. It leaves the SDR lifeless, any strategic vision somewhere between Godot and Billy Bunter’s postal order, perennially absent.

None of this has much impact without considering expenditure. The reviewers worked within ‘the budgetary context of a transition to 2.5 per cent of GDP’; as I wrote yesterday, the government’s ‘ambition’ to reach 3 per cent in the next parliament is provisional. Thereafter little more is said about money, but it is hard to believe that the extra 0.2 per cent as of 2027 will satisfy all of the commitments within the review. It also avoids the fact that the MoD’s Equipment Plan (which will be superseded by a ‘Defence Investment Plan’) currently has a deficit of around £17 billion.

The SDR is not a bad document, but it is a disappointing one. It is hard to read it and see a clear strategic purpose and narrative or any vision of Britain in the world ten or 20 years hence. When it is set alongside the six or seven reviews beginning with Lord Robertson’s own 1998 Strategic Defence Review, it will not be considered a classic.

The architects of ‘AI rights’ are a threat to humanity

It’s easy to see that gender ideology is being used to undermine biological truth – but what’s harder to fathom is why. I am persuaded that the end goal is, in fact, to pave the way for human symbiosis with artificial intelligence, which Silicon Valley has been promising us since the early 2000s. Encouraging children to embrace macabre rituals like medical castration convinces them that they can mix and match parts of their anatomy, which makes it a simple matter for them to accept AI augmentation.

We are at the beginning of more extreme changes to humanity than we have ever seen before. The gene-editing technology CRISPR now allows us to genetically alter human beings. AI-human interfacing, genetic engineering and technological reproduction together are poised to rapidly change our species. As AI grows in strength, we must expect the legal landscape to change to accommodate the rights of “AI-enhanced” people. Rights for augmented humans are already under way in Chile, for example. These developing neuro-rights separate the data of a person’s mind from the human rights of their entire bodily integrity.

The men at the frontier of this business are worth studying. I’ve often written about Martine Rothblatt who is more important than people have so far been able to understand. Rothblatt, who has worked for NASA and co-founded SiriusXM satellite radio, has worked on the human genome project at the UN level developing an ethics-based approach for the cyborgs that are already evolving. He calls himself a transsexual-transhumanist and has written and lectured widely about transcending our sexed reality, and ultimately our humanity, with tech.

What is presented as a benevolent movement for the marginalized is, in fact, a body-denying ideology

Rothblatt has long argued theoretically for AI rights and created legal structure in the early 1990s for those wishing to transcend biological, sexed reality. In 2014, he was asked by Technology Review, “What kind of reactions will people have to virtual beings?” He responded: “The reactions I get tell me discrimination is going to be inevitable.” Rothblatt and his friends will try to persuade us that it is a great injustice to favor humans over AI. This language also mimics the language of the White House “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” published by the Biden administration: “You should not face discrimination by algorithms and systems should be used and designed in an equitable way. Algorithmic discrimination occurs when automated systems contribute to unjustified different treatment or impacts disfavoring people based on their race, color, ethnicity, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions, gender identity, intersex status and sexual orientation), religion, age, national origin, disability, veteran status, genetic information or any other classification protected by law.”

Note, human attachment to racial, cultural, national and sexual identity is framed as identity politics. This is nothing more than a complete colonization of humanity, a destruction of usual boundaries toward a melding with AI.

Ray Kurzweil, of Google, who is famous for his speculations about a coming singularity and a combining of humanity with AI, mentored and inspired Rothblatt. Then there’s the Pritzker family. In 2020, Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois made a bold move by approving $230 million in AI funding, aiming to position Illinois at the forefront of the next generation of scientific and technological breakthroughs. As I’ve written before, the Pritzker family is deeply invested in advanced medical technologies and are driving gender ideology into grade schools with a curriculum funded by major technology corporations.

Tim Gill, of the Gill Foundation, one of the most important LGBT NGOs in the US, is founder of the computer software corporation Quark Press. He sold his stock to start the Gill Foundation and has helped drive gender ideology. Together with his husband, Scott Miller, they are the largest financial backers of the gay-rights movement in the US. He is now invested in home AI systems.

As it happens, Miller was appointed US Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein in 2021, under President Biden. On January 1, 2022, Switzerland implemented a new effective and simplified gender-change recognition process based on self-determination. No divorce, surgery or medical conditions required for individuals. It allows the change between the female and male gender; nonbinary genders are not recognized in Swiss law. Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Malta and Norway have similar legislation. As well as being a major pharmaceutical hub, Switzerland is known as the Silicon Valley of robotics, and the greater Zurich area is a leader in robotics, computer vision and AI.

The trajectory of appointing US ambassadors to countries not yet fully on board with gender self-ID to strong-arm them into changing their laws to accommodate this rejection of biological reality is a recurring one under the pharma and Silicon Valley-backed Democratic party. It doesn’t always work. David Pressman, appointed as US ambassador to Hungary by Joe Biden, didn’t have much luck with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who is not a fan of gender ideology. Pressman pressured the Hungarian government, referencing a joint statement from 35 countries that expressed “serious concern about the targeting of LGBTQI+ people in Hungary and called for the government to eliminate its discriminatory laws, policies, and practices,” during a Pride parade in Budapest in June last year.

Who could argue with an end to discrimination? But beware. What is presented as a benevolent movement for the marginalized is, in fact, a body-denying ideology moving fast towards a technological dystopia. We are all out of our depth, treading water. But we mustn’t let ourselves sink into inertia. We must arm ourselves with information about how this fundamentally anti-human and inhumane force is operating, and devise creative ways to resist it. If we wish to retain our humanity, there is no choice.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.

Has Trump’s return defanged Ezra Klein?

Wonks are a useful sort to have around; no governing class should be without them. A wonk is someone who makes technical improvements to the existing order of things while remaining obedient to its premises. No social order can run entirely on its own propaganda. There does, somewhere, need to be some group of sober and dutiful people applying themselves to secular problems.

For 21st-century America, this has been the “juicebox mafia,” a group of liberal bloggers who came of age in the early 2000s. Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Markos Moulitsas and Noah Smith were self-conscious wonks – the first, indeed, to treat wonkery as a personal credo.

They called their articles “explainers” rather than op-eds. They declared against both the horse-trading of the Beltway and the baleful influence of dogma. As Klein put it, “the emphasis is on empiricism, not ideology.” They were the first digital natives in DC, and their project was – more than anything else – an attempt to bring the spirit of early Reddit to the halls of government. If the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once represented a certain view of the world, then these wonks were surely its primary spokesmen.

Their moral and political ideas proceeded from the same impulse. For some it is all about the teachings of John Rawls, who held that humans placed behind a “veil of ignorance” without knowledge of their personal circumstances would always opt for a social democracy with market elements; for others it’s “effective altruism”; for the remainder it’s a cruder sort of utilitarianism.

Doctrines like these make up the indispensable high church wing of the state cult of human rights. These people pride themselves on a certain tough-mindedness and honesty about trade-offs but – being true wonks – this has never carried them so far as to question any of the system’s underlying moral premises. Klein gave a succinct summary of the wonk’s dilemma in a 2014 article on “affirmative consent”: “‘Yes Means Yes’ is a terrible law, and I completely support it.”

There is of course a shadow that looms over Abundance, and it’s the man from Mar-a-Lago

Abundance, co-authored by Klein and Derek Thompson, is the old juicebox mafia’s definitive statement to the world in the second Trump era. It is part manifesto, part jeremiad, part postmortem of the failed restoration of 2021-24. Stylistically, it is much chastened: gone is the vaguely Joss Whedon-esque tone that characterized much of the group’s earlier writings. Its thesis is a simple one: that only a huge increase in the quantity of housing, energy and technology can produce the rise in living standards that might hold back the populist tide. What the American left must now commit itself to, then, is the hard technical task of how this increase might be brought about. Social order is everywhere attacked, and only a great heave-ho of wonkery can now save it.

But how? Klein and Thompson have arrived at the same conclusions that Dominic Cummings (an advisor to former prime minister Boris Johnson) has in the UK: that what holds back growth in Anglophone countries is the system of judicial review, local permissions, procurement rules and climate audits that make building anything next to impossible. This “procedure fetish” has massively run up the cost of everything from housing to data centers and railways. According to Klein and Thompson, it was such procedures that doomed the economic program of the Biden administration. Although hundreds of billions were spent on infrastructure and industrial subsidies, these regulations meant that the money was eaten up by lawyers’ fees – and almost nothing was built.

Doing something to fix this system – some bonfire of regulations and a great reining in of judicial review – is the hidden key to growth. Whichever faction unlocks it first will generate a huge amount of material prosperity and probably win politics for the next 50 years. Klein and Thompson recognize this – and so much of Abundance is a slightly frantic attempt to show why this agenda can only be carried out under the left’s leadership.

They should be careful what they wish for, because it is the left that would have the most to lose from such a course. It is impossible to separate the modern American left from the country’s sprawling praetorian class of public servants: the very same people who staff the bureaucracies, NGOs and law firms that block development. As traditional forms of union organization continue to decline, it is these people who increasingly make up the social base of the Democratic party. Its different factions may quarrel, but what unites them is a completely to-the-wall defense of this section of society; all valorize these people in some way. For those who follow Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it’s the teachers’ unions, the DMV and the shady “community organizer”; for others, such as Eric Swalwell or Amy Klobuchar, it’s spy-bureaucrats like Peter Strzok.

It’s very telling that, amid all the apocalyptic frenzy of Trump 47, the only time the left has so far really bestirred itself was over plans to fire government employees. In making the case for limiting the power of the courts, petty officialdom and the NGOs, Klein and Thompson are asking the left to liquidate itself. Any serious rollback of the kinds of regulations that made California’s high-speed railway run $95 billion over budget would, in practice, mean a massive reduction in public and third-sector headcount – ending it as a social force. They are inviting America’s bureaucratic class – the country’s rulers since 1945 – to revenge itself against MAGA by committing suicide. Klein and Thompson are caught in a bind: maintaining the rule of the bureaucracy requires economic growth, but economic growth can only be achieved by destroying the bureaucracy.

Our authors spend the rest of Abundance trying to escape this dire conclusion. They hark back to FDR and the New Deal to show that growth can be achieved through big government as well. That’s certainly true, but not big government as we’d recognize it, and not the kind you’ll see at the DMV. The Roosevelt administration ignored the courts and gave 25-year-olds plenary authority over massive projects – such as the electrification of the Tennessee Valley. What does this remind you more of: the Biden administration, or DoGE? Whether you want small government or a return to mid-century “state capacity,” you will need much simpler processes, much greater levels of executive responsibility and far fewer lawyers. Either way, millions of people are going to have to lose their jobs.

Elsewhere, Klein and Thompson argue that only the mainstream left can carry out this program, because everyone else is too mired in “zero-sum” thinking to embrace the politics of abundance. Curiously enough, this is something from which their own moral ideas always seem exempt. There is a pious note early on in Abundance about “stolen land,” along with some noise about inequality – this, of course, being the classic example of “zero-sum” thinking: that someone else’s gain is your loss. Abundance rightly makes much of the AI race, but it is precisely the effective altruist ideas people like Klein subscribe to that have done so much to slow down America’s progress on this front.

There’s a fairly lame attempt to dismiss concerns about illegal or legal immigration as a species of zero-sum, because with enough abundance citizens and foreigners would not be competing for the same resources. One should note that this is certainly not the way that Singapore or the Gulf monarchies – the most YIMBY (“Yes in my backyard”) of states – run their affairs; these places have high levels of immigration, but maintain a strict separation between residency and citizenship. If Klein and Thompson really are just interested in cheaper labor, then surely they’d be willing to countenance such a system? Please.

Abundance sets itself against “democracy by lawsuit” and calls for a greater focus on outcomes over procedures. This is all well and good, but, again, these are the last sorts of forces that Klein and Thompson should want to unleash. What is the mainstream left in 2025, apart from a narrow defense of procedure? It has essentially given up on defending anything about the current society – the only argument now is that any alternative to it would be morally unconscionable.

They are inviting America’s bureaucratic class to revenge itself against MAGA by committing suicide

The current line is that the American people must simply accept problems like illegal immigration and street crime because of human rights – and that any attempt to solve these problems is a prelude to tyranny. In this sense, the Abundance agenda – if implemented – would quickly escape its authors’ intentions. If the courts lose the power to decide whether data center construction happens, the public will naturally start to wonder whether they should also lose this power over deportations, and then it’ll be curtains. Once again, Abundance calls for economic reform to forestall social revolution – but you cannot have the former without the latter. There is, of course, a shadow that looms over Abundance, and it’s the man from Mar-a-Lago. Like Klein and Thompson, Donald Trump is someone who’s neither conventionally statist nor conventionally laissez-faire. Like Klein and Thompson, he favors an active state with the power to route around outdated procedures. He also possesses a certain pharaonic sense that recalls the “state capacity” of the Roosevelt and Eisenhower eras: building Space Forces and Big Beautiful Walls.

In the White House, Trump is currently running the closest thing to the Abundance agenda seen yet: he is carrying out a program of deregulation to make construction easier; corralling $500 billion in AI investment; and is, of course, doing more than anyone else to deconstruct the system of “democracy by lawsuit.”

Faced with the most YIMBYish administration in living memory, we find these wonks holding themselves aloof only out of various Joe Scarborough-eqsue moralisms. You start to get the sense that these were the things they really cared about all along.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.

Unpacking John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s complex relationship

Fifty-five years after they broke up, what is there left to say about the Beatles? There have been so many books written about the group and so many obsessively detailed websites devoted to exploring every song, every public utterance, every twist and turn in their history, that the average rational man or woman might think they know all there is to be known about them.

Craig Brown’s magisterial 2020 volume 150 Glimpses of the Beatles was a pop-cultural dive into their peerless influence and standing; Ian MacDonald’s still legendary Revolution in the Head dives into the 241 songs that they recorded (although, of course, it should be 242, thanks to the emergence of “Now And Then” in 2023) and does so with grace, intelligence and slightly frightening attention to detail. And McCartney himself analyzed his lyrics in conversation with the poet Paul Muldoon a few years ago, treating them with a sincerity usually reserved for the work of the deceased.

Ian Leslie is unusual compared to most Beatles biographers in that he is not primarily known as a music journalist. His previous books, with titles such as Conflicted and Born Liars, revolve around the study of human psychology. This makes him a fresh and interesting choice to tackle the age-old subject, but I was skeptical, when beginning the book, that even he would have anything original to say.

John and Paul emerge from this as people, not icons, and your grasp of their genius is all the greater for it

After all, the Beatles legend is now so well-known as to resemble the Bible in its monolithic status. How John Lennon and Paul McCartney met as teenagers at a church fête in Liverpool in July 1957, when Lennon was playing with his band the Quarrymen. How they formed a songwriting and performing partnership, subsequently joined by George Harrison and, eventually, Ringo Starr, that metamorphosed into the most successful pop band that there has ever been. How the pressures of success saw the Beatles first give up live performance and then, beset by the difficulties caused by the death of their manager Brian Epstein and their growing differences in musical and artistic temperament, how they split up in 1970 amid very public rancor and argument. How, eventually, a degree of reconciliation came about between the four that was tragically curtailed by Lennon’s assassination in December 1980.

It’s one of the most eventful narratives in popular music and so well-worn that I approached John & Paul without high expectations. Yet Leslie is a sufficiently gifted writer, both as a marshaler of facts and as a storyteller, that he can, in the words of “Hey Jude,” “take a sad song and make it better.” His innovative, and largely convincing, idea is to regard Lennon and McCartney essentially as platonic lovers. This means that the genius and inspiration of the songs they composed lies in the intensity of the romantic relationship between the two: admittedly one largely driven by Lennon, who is, of course, dead and has not had the luxury of having decades to defend himself or finesse some of his more egregious public remarks.

While John & Paul portrays McCartney in an almost entirely positive light (bar a rather blasé attitude toward romantic fidelity in his pre-Linda Eastman days and occasional shortness toward less brilliant colleagues), Lennon emerges as less talented but arguably more interesting because of, rather than despite, his failings. 

I’ve always believed that McCartney was the presiding genius of the Beatles, but this comes down to musical taste. I think the likes of “Penny Lane,” “Let It Be” and most of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road are superior to Lennon’s work. Even George Harrison’s finest songs, such as “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Something,” give Lennon a run for his money.

Yet Lennon’s 40-year life was a tumultuous, often chaotic one. The son of a mother who was too immature and flighty to bring him up, and who died after being hit by a car when he was a teenager, Lennon concealed his deep-rooted grief and consequent misanthropy underneath a veneer of Liverpudlian wit and detachment. He was belligerent with others, men and women alike, and sought escape in sex and alcohol and then, when he was fantastically wealthy, drugs: he started with cannabis and LSD and eventually became up a rather pathetic figure, strung out on heroin. Ironically, when he worked on his sobriety, recaptured his artistic talent and returned to work, he was shot by an obsessed fan before he could finally make peace with the semi-estranged McCartney, as well as the rest of the Beatles.

Leslie excels at depicting the complex relationship between the two talents, although he provides many points of discussion and debate for fully paid-up aficionados of the Fab Four. He divides the book into brief (and not so brief) chapters, each of which revolves around the discussion of a Lennon-McCartney song. Sometimes, as with most of their early work and “A Day in the Life,” these were true co-creations, but in many other instances, they were fully formed songs worked up by one man or the other.

In some cases, even while in the Beatles, John and Paul existed primarily as solo artists. “Yesterday,” for instance – which Leslie fascinatingly pinpoints as the moment when control of the Beatles slid from Lennon to McCartney – was performed by Paul with an acoustic guitar and a string quartet. In Britain, it was dismissed as an album track, but it became a significant hit in the United States and showed the true versatility of its creator’s talents. Lennon was jealous – and not for the last time.

Leslie picks his material carefully. There is a decent amount on the relationship between Lennon and Yoko Ono, who does not emerge as badly as she did in Brown’s 150 Glimpses, but is still portrayed as almost comically controlling and domineering, dictating how her husband should behave via tarot cards.

There is rather less on the other Beatles and Ringo, in particular, is reduced almost to walk-on status, with Leslie giving him roughly the same treatment as McCartney’s much-loved sheepdog Martha. Nonetheless, he is generous about Starr’s musical abilities (in a way that many biographers have not been) and Harrison emerges well from the book, too, as a principled, witty man possessed of an extraordinary musical talent that was only stymied by the once-in-a-lifetime fact that he was playing in a band with two even greater talents.

Ringo is given roughly the same treatment as McCartney’s much-loved sheepdog Martha

I have, I must confess, often found it hard to warm to Lennon. Many of the songs are peerless, of course, but “Imagine” remains one of the most false and hypocritical artistic statements ever put out there (a multimillionaire singing “Imagine no possessions” is always going to stick in the throat.) Even in the Beatles, there was an unfortunate tendency to drift off into a kind of mystique. This worked tremendously well for “Tomorrow Never Knows” – which still sounds like the future of music – but by the time Lennon was tormenting listeners with the faux-experimentalism of “Revolution 9” and the psychedelia-by-numbers of “Across the Universe,” it was hard to feel that he had rejected the more classical stylings of McCartney as an act of youthful rebellion, even though he was older than his bandmate. Yet Leslie makes him a complex, sympathetic human being, rather than the saint (or sinner) that he has been so often painted as.

Still, it’s the McCartney show in the end, and once again he has charmed a biographer: a possible reaction to the notoriously anti-Macca Philip Norman claiming that Lennon made up three-quarters of the Beatles. It’s salutary to learn that, as soon as the band had made their first millions, Lennon, Harrison and Starr all fled to their Surrey mansions, as if in fear of what they had unleashed, whereas McCartney threw himself into the heart of 1960s London and embraced the countercultural era that he, as much as anyone, had helped to create.

It is he who has managed to steer the legacy of the Beatles over the past half-century and his well-received, lengthy solo shows offer great pleasure for many, myself included, who were not even born when the band broke up. Yet there has always been a steeliness under the sentiment, a knowledge that a sympathetic and admiring world would turn on him at the slightest sign of weakness.

Leslie begins the book with McCartney, dazed and in shock after the news of Lennon’s death, and unable to say anything more articulate than “It’s a drag,” an unconsciously flippant comment – for which he was pilloried. The author sees it as a cousin to another revelatory remark when the adolescent McCartney was told of his mother’s sudden death after cancer surgery, leading him to blurt out in shock, “But what will we do without her money?” Callous, perhaps, but also an unguarded expression of horror.

And that is ultimately what shines through from John & Paul. There may be other books that are more insightful about the musicology (although Leslie is no slouch in this regard), the biographical details or the gossip. The book does not contain any original material to speak of, and could be regarded as a high-class example of a cut-and-paste job. Yet what it does do, more successfully than any other book about the Beatles I have read, is to humanize its principal architects once again.

You end John & Paul not merely with admiration as to how these two men achieved wonders together, but in understanding of their essential humanity, warped and flawed though it often was. They emerge from this book as people, not icons, and your understanding of their genius is all the greater for it.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.

Joan Didion’s unedited record of therapy is morbidly fascinating

In Notes to John, Joan Didion’s ostensibly private record of three years’ therapy under psychiatrist Dr. Roger MacKinnon – one memory troubles her a great deal. When her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne was about seven, they watched the (wholly unsuitable) Night of the Living Dead, before Didion insisted Quintana accompany her to the kitchen at midnight. She pretended to be afraid for herself, but really she worried the glass doors of the living room made Quintana vulnerable to intruders. Reading this book sometimes feels like being the imagined predator lurking in the dark: we catch only a slice of the illuminated interior, and Didion behaves as if she isn’t being seen.

By the end of 1999, Quintana, who was 33, had reached a new crisis point in her struggle with alcoholism. Quintana’s psychiatrist, Dr. Kass, suggested that Didion should undertake therapy to alleviate her own anxiety that might have been hindering her daughter’s recovery. It is hard to imagine that Didion, the obsessive rewriter, would be glad of her family’s suffering being displayed in this unedited volume – let alone Quintana’s. But they cannot tell us either way. Quintana died in 2005, at just 39, of illnesses possibly connected to her alcoholism. Didion died in 2021, aged 87.

Even if a deceased writer didn’t intend a piece of work to see the light, publishing it might be reasonable if it is of literary merit. (Look at Kafka’s doughty executor Max Brod ignoring his friend’s wishes that his work be posthumously burned.) Where it is not of merit, but the text reveals nothing overly intimate or sensitive, there can be no great harm. Still, many might argue about the necessity for publication.

Unfortunately, neither justification applies here. The British critic Gaby Wood argued that publishing Didion’s private therapy notes now, “with minimal framing,” may offer her some protection against hostile, cherry-picking biographers. Though this is persuasive, it doesn’t bestow merit upon the book.

The main psychological tendency it reveals is not cruelty, but doubt

Psychoanalysis is notoriously repetitive and in Notes to John the tragedies are circular. New and old wrongs emerge on both sides and become both the damage and its cause. Fault is fundamental but proves impossible to pin down. MacKinnon alerts Didion to her “pattern” early on. Guilt, control, pessimism and her absent father are recurring themes. Her close bond with husband John Gregory Dunne (to whom the notes are addressed) is examined and prioritized over Quintana’s status as their sole (adopted) child. Readers looking for headlines may alight on Didion’s love of expensive things, her suspicion of AA, her questions over whether Quintana was truly ill and her confession that, after an especially difficult weekend, “at several points” she “didn’t like” her daughter.

The main psychological tendency it reveals is not cruelty – and emphatically not “denial” (MacKinnon believes Didion “grew up without the gene”). It reveals doubt. Readers can detect this elsewhere in Didion’s work. In Blue Nights, a memoir about Quintana’s death, Didion meditates on her own responsibility: “Was I the problem? Was I always the problem?”

Didion often interrogated her own choices, but she never abandoned her inimitable style – controlled, elusive, and probably self-protective. At 26 she wrote her essay “On Self Respect,” in which she reexamined an old notebook entry about disliking herself. “Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes.”

Even writing about Quintana’s alcoholism in Blue Nights, when she admitted that grief was making her thinking tentative, her sentences still carry a familiar rhythm: “I had seen the charm, I had seen the composure, I had seen the suicidal despair.”

For Didion, style is everything. It is the great failure of Notes to John that it lacks her distinctive voice altogether. Didion distinguished between her rough notes and worked-out pieces. In one session, a recent failure to remember what someone has said “long enough to write it down” frustrates her even though she did not plan to use the notes in question. She was a reporter after all: “taking notes was what I did.”

Elsewhere words and phrases provide indecipherable shorthand. A conversation about her fear of losing Quintana includes the one-word sentence: “Whalewatching.” Maybe this refers to a brilliant, coded anecdote; perhaps whales were indeed watched, or the nervous Didion prohibited her daughter from this pleasure. Readers can do nothing but speculate.

The most interesting questions raised concern over the value of the therapeutic process to which the family was subjected. Frequent contact between MacKinnon and Kass supposedly allowed them to coordinate their approach; details shared by Quintana in her sessions are passed to Didion in hers. MacKinnon coaches Didion to “play the guilt card, play it shamelessly,” and to convince Quintana that her suicide would make her parents’ lives unbearable. In Didion’s shared session with Quintana and Kass, she does play it – and Kass reprimands her. Didion “refrained from saying that Dr. MacKinnon had told me to lay it on her every chance I got.”

If Didion had revised this book for publication before her death, she might have made this a climax of the exploration of the divisions between practitioners of talking therapy, or the treatment’s limitations, or even its futility. Maybe she didn’t think it proved any point and it was another frustrating moment in that horrible chapter. We can’t assume the latter. We only have her notes. This morbidly fascinating but ephemeral exercise in literary exhumation suggests that some things are better left alone.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.

Erik Satie was an inadvertent innovator

The music critic Ian Penman has structured his new book about the great French composer and rascally agent provocateur Erik Satie in three parts, in the manner of classic Satie compositions such as Trois Gymnopédies, Gnossiennes and Trois morceaux en forme de poire. A hundred years after his death, aged 59, in 1925, Satie remains one of the great enigmas of 20th-century composition. A frequent visitor of Parisian cabarets, immersed in the city’s chanson tradition, his work could also be bafflingly conceptual.

He was connected to the world of classical composition through his friendships with Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, but remained determinately his own person. His music is regularly held up as a precursor to John Cage and to ambient electronica alike. Satie liked to structure his compositions in three parts, not because one part was a development of another, but because he could reveal three different perspectives on the same harmonic tics and melodic digressions: twice would have seemed too much like a simple variation but three was enough to let loose the idea that musical material could forever be in the process of becoming something else.

Penman’s brief book takes us around Satie’s life three times: as biographical sketch, as an essential A-Z of Satie landmarks and also as a personal diary that details the author’s findings and thoughts as he was working on his manuscript. The A-Z and diary are essentially amplifications and retreads through the basics Penman outlines in his biographical sketch – different perspectives on the same themes and obsessions. Satie would surely have approved. Although Penman makes it clear that Three Piece Suite is not a cradle-to-grave biography, his account of what made Satie stand out from the composers who surrounded him and why we should still care about his music a century later, is deftly achieved.

The heavy, Germanic seriousness of Wagner – devoid of any humor – drove Satie nuts

The book opens with a glimpse of Satie, the year before his death, goofing around on the roof of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on a shoot for his nonsense film Entr’acte in the company of the filmmaker/writer René Clair and the Dada-minded polymath visual artist Francis Picabia. So much of the Satie story – including a doomed love affair with the painter Suzanne Valadon from which his emotions never recovered and his long, lonely walks through Paris – reads like a desperately sad study in frustration. It’s heartening to be reminded that he also had fun. Satie dances and pratfalls in front of the camera and Penman places the film in the great tradition of fooling around from the Situationists to Spike Milligan, Monty Python and punk.

Penman is a British author who found his voice as a writer while working for the New Musical Express during the late 1970s before gravitating toward publications like the experimental British music magazine the Wire and the London Review of Books. There, he despatched columns about music of all stripes and shades from jazz, rock and electronic music and also film (his previous book was a study of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder), which means he approaches Satie with antennae entirely distinct from any specialist classical music writer.

Indeed, he tells us that he finds current Satie biography “useful, especially the musicological small print,” but the “mere stock-taking” of the classically-minded biographer means that the “essential strangeness of Satie’s life feels entirely absent.” The word Penman returns to repeatedly in his quest for the spirit of Satie is “blague,” – joke – which he introduces as a concept during his biographical sketch and then circles back to, taking a fresh perspective, in his A-Z. He concedes this is a word for which a direct equivalent in English does not exist. Literally meaning “joker,” a “blagueur” was regarded in turn-of-the-century Paris as someone who delighted in trampling over self-regarding ego and bourgeois convention.

Satie’s “sly, puckish wit” extended to creating a music-drama, Le bâtard de Tristan, in 1892, for which a concept existed and was announced to the public, but with one aspect missing – Satie never wrote a note of its music. Satie’s loathing of Richard Wagner and of the toxicity of his influence on French music knew no limits. The heavy, Germanic seriousness of Wagner – devoid of humor and the realization that setting German myths to music, complete with mammoth orchestra, was, if you think about it, an odd thing to do – drove Satie nuts.

It was enough to end his close association with Debussy after Satie felt his friend’s large-scale opera – Pelléas et Mélisande – had skirted uncomfortably close to Wagnerian ambition. Debussy, in return, advised Satie refocused on questions of form in his music, to which Satie responded with his Trois morceaux en forme de poire (Three pieces in the shape of a pear), because music shaped “as a pear” obviously had intrinsic form… right? Although, as Penman points out, “poire” was also slang of the period for “fathead.”

Penman is wholly sympathetic to Satie’s analysis of Wagner’s operas as overcooked and distastefully bombastic: music marinated in testosterone. Classical purists are likely to take offense at such a view, damn Satie as a “maverick,” as too eccentric for his own good and as a poor creative cousin of the more musically “responsible” Ravel, Debussy and Milhaud. Penman begs to differ and regards Satie as the essential catalyst for so much of the later 20th-century art he admires.

Satie’s world, says Penman, was “un-epic” and “slower and differently noisy” from life as most composers perceived it. The silliness of the Entr’acte film shoot, six months before his death, exists in notable contrast to his life otherwise. His affair with Suzanne Valadon ended after a few months, mainly because Satie’s obsessive tendencies pushed her away. The lovesick piece he wrote in the aftermath of their breakup, Vexations, was suitably tortured but in a way only Satie could have conceived of.

Twisting and distending a simple chorale-like statement while managing to retain its essential beauty, he added the suggestion to the score that his chorale could be repeated 840 times, which, if taken literally, would add up to a playing time of some 18 hours. Satie was apparently determined to drag the listener inside his own fracturing, compulsive mind.

Even Satie aficionados will have much to learn from this slim, elegantly written and revelatory volume

Penman speculates about the nature of the intimate relationship Satie may or may not have shared with Valadon. The notion that, before their falling out, Satie had a crush on Debussy strikes Penman as unlikely, but was he “unisexual” (as in “just the once: with Valadon”) or, perhaps, asexual? Penman settles on the word “Satie-sexual,” meaning that he was sexual, but in a way beyond our modern comprehension, which feels compatible with a composer who was also uniquely ahistorical. There’s a sense of the erotic, too, in Penman’s idea that Satie’s music consisted of “carefully chosen notes that sound like they were always there, waiting to be touched and awakened.”

For all his personal unhappiness, he was an inadvertent innovator. The carefully manufactured image Satie cultivated – always wearing a green velvet suit and carrying an umbrella, no matter what the weather – puts Penman in mind of the carefully calibrated look of the suited-and-booted members of the German electronic band Kraftwerk.

The pieces Satie wrote, beginning in 1917, that he termed “furniture music” – instrumental works designed to dissolve into the surrounding ambience of a space – feel like the starting point of John Cage’s 4’33”, and also herald the ambient electronic soundscapes of Brian Eno, music Penman describes as having “no separation of background and foreground.”

Inside the glassy beauty of Satie’s harmonies Penman detects the stirrings of the formal ordering of notes characteristic of his favorite jazz pianist Bill Evans, whereas even a few bars of Satie are like “someone cut away all the faff and bore and chaff and chore and ego moan of Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert.”

Penman was put off classical music during his youth by “the ‘pomp’ of Holst, Tchaikovsky and Wagner,” and “puffed-up symphonies and self-important concertos,” enabled by “sweaty drama-queen conductors.” Modernist music, he declares – presumably referring to urban soundscapes typified by the scores of Edgard Varèse and Elliott Carter – was too ready to paint cities as places of “violent cacophony [and] oppressive dissonance… no one seems to want to entertain the notion that it might also be enormous fun.”

Penman hears Satie’s “economy, élan, humor… a small, canny, playful alternative to Sturm und Drang” as a corrective to the leering high-rise orchestral screech. His sweeping dismissal of so much music feels, perhaps, a tad overcooked itself, but the descriptive skills Penman brings to outlining his dialogue with Satie suggests how deeply the two are kindred spirits. Even Satie aficionados will have much to learn from this slim, elegantly written and revelatory volume.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.

Seventy-five years of Strangers on a Train

According to her own notebook, the idea for Strangers on a Train came to its author, Patricia Highsmith, in December 1945, while she was walking along the Hudson River in upstate New York with her mother, Mary Coates, and her stepfather, Stanley Highsmith. Given her fractious relationship with her mother, it is not surprising that the idea for a novel – two people swapping murders – came while in the company of the woman she thought of as her lifelong enemy.

Divorced from Patricia’s father nine days before she was born in 1921, Mary spent most of her daughter’s childhood courting a new suitor, Stanley. When Patricia was 12, her mother and stepfather left her with her grandparents in Fort Worth for a full year, preferring to fight each other in the privacy of their New York apartment. Pat never got over it and spent the rest of her life seeking out the company of pet snails and cats. Her relationships with other women were complicated, volatile and usually ended badly.

Yet Highsmith developed the skill of turning her personal misery into compelling fiction. Seldom was this better realized than in her first novel, Strangers on a Train, which turns 75 this year. It was memorably transferred to the silver screen by Alfred Hitchcock, but the book, which has perhaps suffered by comparison, deserves to be re-evaluated: it is one of Highsmith’s most accomplished journeys into humanity’s dark side.

The narrative hinges on two men meeting by chance on a long train journey and discussing the idea of each committing a murder for the other, so that there is no way of tracing either of them back to the victim. Guy Haines is an architect on the brink of a grand career, stuck in a toxic marriage to a woman who refuses to divorce him. Charles Bruno is an alcoholic mama’s boy with access to a huge inheritance – if only he could get rid of his philandering father.

The book explores the tense relationship between the two strangers as Bruno, having committed the initial murder, insinuates himself into Guy’s life, becoming first a tiresome pest and then a threatening presence. Highsmith presents Guy as initially hostile to Bruno.

But as the story unfolds, Highsmith shows that both men are drawn powerfully to each other, answering some deep, unconscious need within themselves.

Inspiration came from many sources, including Albert Camus’s 1942 novel L’Étranger. Highsmith admired the way its central character drifted into an abstracted state of mind after killing an Arab. She was also influenced by the news story of Robert Murl Daniels, a multiple murderer whose newspaper photo she had pasted in her diary, and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Highsmith referred to the Russian novelist as “the master” and there are many parallels between the two books, not least the agonies of guilt and madness in the aftermath of committing murder, and the perpetrator’s attempts to justify the killings due to the moral inferiority of the victims.

When she began the book, the 24-year old Highsmith was working tirelessly to become a professional writer. She had abandoned the 30-page manuscript of an unpublished novel and spent the rest of the year penning more than a dozen suspense short stories, unsuccessfully pitched to magazines despite the help of a literary agent. She earned a modest income by writing storylines for dime-store comic books, occasionally working with Stan Lee of Marvel Comics. But her idea for Strangers on a Train was in another league altogether.

Highsmith would not complete the first draft until 1948, at the Yaddo writer’s retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York. Success came swiftly: it was immediately bought by Harper & Brothers for its “Novel of Suspense” imprint. The title came from Highsmith’s fiancé Marc Brandel, to whom she had become engaged despite continuing numerous lesbian love affairs. Poor advice – particularly from her mother – had led her to the belief that she could “cure” her homosexuality by marrying a man.

Instead, Highsmith’s primary devotion, for which she suffered in life, was to her characters, who charmed, repelled and delighted her. She was a sort of method writer, steeping herself in the minds of her protagonists until they became an extension of her. At times, this verged on automatic writing, over which she only had limited agency. “I am so happy when Bruno reappears in the novel,” she noted in her diary in 1947 while writing Strangers on a Train, “I love him!”

She was a method writer, steeping herself in the minds of her protagonists until they became an extension of her

Upon publication on March 15, 1950, the book was an immediate success with both readers and critics. Eleanor Roosevelt praised the novel in her “My Day” column, which was syndicated in 62 national newspapers. This led to a huge spike in sales of the book. A bidding war quickly erupted for the film rights, with an anonymous buyer securing them for a paltry $7,500. This turned out to be Hitchcock, who insisted on owning the rights in perpetuity.

Crafting the screenplay for the film did not go well. After being turned down by John Steinbeck and Dashiell Hammett, Hitchcock went with noir legend Raymond Chandler, who had cut his teeth as a screenwriter on Double Indemnity. But after several rewrites nobody was happy with the script and Chandler was dropped, though his name does appear in the credits.

It ended up being written by the little-known Czenzi Ormonde. The film was received well by audiences upon its release in 1951, but represents a considerable departure from the book. Hamstrung by the censors, the picture lacks the novel’s dark exploration of dualism and gives the story a safe Hollywood veneer by turning one of the lead characters into a hero.

In the film, Guy Haines (Farley Granger) is a tennis pro with a winsome smile and floppy hair, a social climber reluctant to carry out his side of the murderous bargain. In the novel, Haines is a complex character with a streak of selfishness, an architect who “felt rather like two people, one of whom could create and feel in harmony with God when he created, and the other who could murder.” Guy is devoted to his mistress, Anne, who was born into a wealthy family and is kindness personified, offering an angelic counterpoint to his scheming wife: “The taste of Scotch, though Guy didn’t much care for it, was pleasant because it reminded him of Anne. She drank Scotch, when she drank. It was like her, golden, full of light, made with careful art.”

The character of Anne in the film, played by Ruth Roman, was one of the main objections Highsmith herself made, when commenting on the film in a 1988 interview with Gerald Peary. “She should be much warmer. I thought it was ludicrous that [Guy is] aspiring to be a politician, and that he’s supposed to be in love with that stone angel.” She did, however, think that the scene-stealing Robert Walker was the right choice to play the psychopathic Bruno: “He was excellent. He had elegance and humor and the proper fondness for his mother.”

Since Hitchcock’s interpretation, several other films have alluded to its central narrative. The 1969 film Once You Kiss a Stranger switches the protagonists from male to female and the setting to a country club, but sticks to the central notion of two strangers swapping murders. And I wonder what she might have made of Danny DeVito’s 1987 film Throw Momma From The Train, which turned the tale into a self-referential screwball comedy. She never commented on the homage, including the scene where DeVito’s character fantasizes about stabbing his mother in the head with a pair of scissors. It’s a scene that Highsmith herself had penned in a very early short story.

So why should we still be reading Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel, 75 years on? All the themes and character types explored throughout her 50-year career are set out in Strangers on a Train. There are echoes of Tom Ripley – her most enduring character – in Charles Bruno, though she made Ripley much more likable and therefore popular, giving him five whole novels’ worth of literary life. Anyone embarking on a reading of Highsmith’s works would do well to begin with Strangers on a Train, as it is probably, with the exception of The Talented Mr, Ripley, the most accessible of her novels, and the one with the most conventional plot and pace.

Strangers on a Train was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award just a year after publication – an impressive achievement for a first novel. It is now possible to regard it as the cri de coeur of a major 20th-century literary talent, which ably justifies the Dostoevsky comparisons and suggests that all her hard work and personal suffering was worth it in the end. A 1948 entry from her diary, written while she was working on the book, goes: “Generally it is selfishness in an artist. He sees it as selfishness for such a worthy cause, too. Generally, in one form or another, it is a self-preservative selfishness, in regard to his not giving enough of himself to the world or another person.”

This self-preservative selfishness meant that Patricia Highsmith saved the best and worst of herself for her novels, for which we should be grateful. And at its dark, complex heart, Strangers on a Train represents this brilliant author at her most contradictory – and greatest.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.

Why does Irish art avoid the Troubles?

Almost three decades after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, it is possible, if not always easy, to see the funny side of the Troubles. Derry Girls, Lisa McGee’s coming-of-age television series, and Milkman, Anna Burns’s surreal novel, wring laughs as well as tears out of mayhem.

There are few laughs in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, which did “for modern film” according to one critic, “what Caravaggio did for Renaissance painting.” For those who prefer horror unmediated by fiction, Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing is the best example of longform journalism since Capote’s In Cold Blood.

But along with their setting, these dazzling creations have something else in common: to get made, they all needed the backing of a producer or publisher from the UK or US.

As the violence settled into a grinding war, poets saw they were living through Tragedy with a capital T

Visitors to Ireland often find it odd, and rather bogus, how little southerners seem to know or care about what happens across the border. If northerners never forget, we in the south affect to be blind. It’s partly defensive, this act. Ireland, a proudly Catholic country in her first decades of independence, was too poor and weak to help our co-religionists over the border. Easier to deal with our own weed-filled garden if we could see or hear no evil over the neighbor’s fence.

That act ended when youthful soixante-huitards challenged inequality from San Francisco to Paris. Catholics who tried marching for civil rights in Northern Ireland had their heads cracked. On Bloody Sunday, 26 unarmed protesters were shot in Derry. Days later, Dubliners burned down the British Embassy. Panicked southern politicians like Conor Cruise O’Brien reimposed silence by fiat.

For the sin of interviewing IRA spokesmen, the board of RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster, were fired. Newspaper editors were menaced with prosecution. These brute tactics instilled fear and deference in the media. Nationalist claims, hitherto heard sympathetically, would now be treated with skepticism – something that came increasingly easy as civilian deaths mounted through the 1970s.

The habit of self-censorship, however, took longer to trickle down to the arts. Throughout the Troubles, sculptors such as F.E. McWilliam and painters like Robert Ballagh felt duty-bound to engage them from their different perspectives.

As the violence peaked and settled into a grinding, long war, poets like Seamus Heaney and dramatists such as Brian Friel recognized that they were living through Tragedy with a capital T. The themes that inspired Sophocles and Aeschylus – guilt, betrayal and murder – could be found with little trouble in the back lanes of Belfast, the glens of Armagh. How to navigate those deep waters, without cheap sentiment or trite polemic, was the riddle that became their life’s work.

There is something pathological about the taboo, given Irish art is awashwith the politics of faraway lands

But sustained empathy takes effort. And when the Peace Process began in the 1990s, at a time when some were predicting the end of history, southern artists who had had their fill of the stuff were glad to turn back to their navels. And here we are. The taboo against facing north, which is now firmly entrenched in Dublin’s cultural salons, serves a narrow political purpose.

Sinn Féin, an essentially northern party in 1998, is today a major force either side of the border. That that reality has affected how we view the peace was never more obvious than in 2023, the Good Friday Agreement’s 25th anniversary. Such was the revisionist spin that one would be forgiven for thinking that John Hume had singlehandedly disarmed the IRA.

That same anniversary year, I invited Gerry Adams to sit for a portrait. Earlier this year, I had to explain to the Belfast Telegraph newspaper that the bronze bust I sculpted, which was included in spring’s Kilkenny Portrait Show, was not propaganda but rather a “warts and all” portrait of someone who, whatever else, made history.

Given the sensitivities around the man who led Sinn Féin for 35 years, I knew some would doubt my motives. But a few days later, on the radio, I found myself accosted: “Were you not concerned by how well it would be received? Did you think it would be tainted by people’s opinion of him rather than be appreciated as a piece of work?”

The loaded questions put me on the back foot, but I got the point. The Irish are wary of art about the Troubles because we dislike being manipulated as much as anyone. The fact is that Sinn Féin are adept propagandists and have a perennial appeal to young idealists.

The latest iteration of this soft power is Kneecap, the Belfast hip-hop trio that hipsters affect to enjoy. One of the group’s members wears an Irish tricolor balaclava onstage – and in public. A rightly celebrated column by Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times, titled “Up the ’Ra,” exposed the ignorance that usually lies behind this revolutionary chic: “Up blowing up a young girl who was being collected from dancing lessons by her grandfather, so that her foot was found in a nearby field with the ballet shoe still neatly attached.”

But beyond that performative vulgarity, the taboo against facing north still has force in serious art and letters. McQueen’s Hunger, about the 1981 hunger strike by Irish Republican prisoners in Northern Ireland, could never have been commissioned by RTÉ. That it took a gay, black Englishman to sympathetically dramatize this pivotal moment in recent Irish history is telling. McQueen was angry enough about injustice to eschew any attempt to “tell both sides.” His masterpiece is furiously unbalanced – and all the better for it.

And there is something truly pathological about such a taboo, given that Irish art is awash with politics, all of which concerns far away lands – the USA, Ukraine and, above all, Palestine.

For celebrated Irish authors such as Sally Rooney to hold forth on what she calls “Israeli apartheid” is normal. Yet the people nodding along would be appalled if she spoke in those binary terms about Northern Ireland. Whenever patriotism is considered uncouth, said George Orwell, that thwarted instinct will be “fastened upon some foreign country.” Whose flag is in your bio, comrade?

There are signs that this is changing. Ireland’s former taoiseach – prime minister – Leo Varadkar surprised many in April by coming out of the closet: as a Fenian. “Every generation has its great cause,” he said, “I believe ours is the cause of uniting our island…”

These sentiments would have been most welcome when he held power – but better late then never. That such a canny politician can say this shows the wind has changed. It’s time for Irish artists, too, to turn again and face north.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.

Dead Outlaw is sharp-witted and irreverent

In 1976, the TV series The Six Million Dollar Man arrived to shoot at an amusement park in California. A central attraction was the funhouse ride, where screaming thrillseekers hurtled past a red mannequin hanging garishly from a noose.

It was only when a crew member touched the body – and an arm fell off, revealing bone – that they realized the mannequin was, in fact, a corpse. Painted in phosphorus and slathered in wax, it had been suspended, unnoticed, for years.

So began a frenzied investigation into who this mystery cadaver was. An autopsy revealed that the man had died from a bullet wound. His jaw was wired shut; inside his mouth were ticket stubs to a crime museum and a penny dating back to 1924. He had been preserved using arsenic.

The hanging man turned out to be Elmer McCurdy, an alcoholic train robber and drifter who died in a shootout in Oklahoma in 1911 at the age of 31. Over the next 60 or so years, McCurdy’s embalmed body was sold and resold, to be exhibited at carnivals and in museums and movie theaters before it ended up, dusty and forgotten, in the California theme park.

Having Durand transform into a thing so lifeless emphasizes he was once a real, breathing man, not a punchline

McCurdy’s life – and, more importantly, his bizarre posthumous existence – is the subject of a sharp-witted, irreverent musical, Dead Outlaw, now playing on Broadway after an initial run at Minetta Lane. It superbly pokes fun at America’s yearning to lionize gun-toting antiheroes, exposing the gumption (and room for abuse) embedded in our capitalism-at-all-costs mindset. It also asks us to confront that final frontier: death.

US author and playwright Itamar Moses has teamed up with David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna, who came up with the music and lyrics to create a story that, weirdly, given its morbid subject matter, feels lithe and alive.

Dead Outlaw begins with Elmer McCurdy (Andrew Durand) lying on his back, staring at the sky as he sings a pretty country-infused melody, “The Stars Are Bright.” It’s a beautiful, sweet moment – quiet and serene – until he jumps up with a whoop to hold up a train, which outlines Dead Outlaw’s rock and roll roots. Onstage throughout is the band, playing songs ranging from honky-tonk to blues in a haphazardly made box that could be a stage inside someone’s garage.

At first glance, the box seems limiting, but soon set designer Arnulfo Maldonado’s versatility comes to fruition: actors scale a ladder up the side of the box, spin it around with the band inside, or climb onto the roof. It functions as the musical beating heart of the play. Inside, guiding the action, is bandleader and narrator Jeb Brown: he’s rough-hewn, well-worn, twinkly eyed and born to tell a great yarn.

At a compact 100 minutes Dead Outlaw feels lean and hungry, short and pithy – and all the better for it, helped along by the eight-strong cast’s considerable charms. It also takes big risks. Durand is asked, in the first half, to hold our attention as we follow McCurdy’s life: from a young boy to the disgruntled wandering vagrant who ended up bleeding out in a hay bale.

In the second half, he is asked to play dead. Propped up in a coffin, with a rifle in his hands, McCurdy is exhibited (somewhat romantically, it turns out) as “The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up.” Director David Cromer makes Durand stand for the duration of the second act, stock-still, like one of the frozen street performers in Times Square. Superb lighting by Heather Gilbert emphasizes his shadowy deep-set eyes and gaunt cheeks – both corpse-like – and the only movement Durand displays is when he mummifies, twisting his hands and arms.

The easiest way to depict McCurdy’s corpse would have using been a prop (his red, hanging body is designed by Gloria Sun and is gorgeous in its slimy grotesqueness). But having Durand transform so uncannily into a thing so lifeless and maltreated emphasizes that he was once a real, breathing man, not a punchline or a joke.

It is when McCurdy dies that Dead Outlaw truly comes into its own, charting new territory as an enjoyable romp through the 20th century. Minor characters shine. These include the only woman in the cast, the shape-shifting Julia Knitel, who plays his mourning former girlfriend (and all the other female characters); Eddie Cooper as the coroner who first embalms him; and Trent Saunders as a Cherokee marathon runner.

But it is Thom Sesma as Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles coroner who dissects McCurdy in 1976, who steals the show. During the post-mortem examination, Dr. Noguchi is dry and precise. That is, until he grabs the mic and breaks into song in the Sinatra-styled “Up to the Stars,” rehashing with glee the famous bodies he has performed autopsies on, such as Marilyn Monroe, Sharon Tate and more.

But, ultimately, we are voyeurs too: ogling McCurdy’s fate, both fascinated and repelled

It’s killingly funny, until it’s not. After all, Monroe overdosed, Wood drowned and Tate was stabbed to death at eight months pregnant. I laughed and then I felt uncomfortable and faintly sheepish in what feels like a deliberate ruse of the script. Dead Outlaw operates with a wink, but death is always close. The fate of McCurdy’s corpse wasn’t so different from the Chapel of Bones in Evora, Portugal, where the remains of 5,000 corpses are stuck, in intricate patterns, onto the walls and ceilings. Or memento mori, the pendants and brooches popular in 17th-century Europe that were decorated with skeletons and skulls and were meant to serve as reminders that our time on earth is temporary. It is no accident that – in keeping with these traditions – the recurring anthem in Dead Outlaw is called “Dead”: “Your mama’s dead, your daddy’s dead… and so are you.”

The musical hints that we can disapprove of the men and women who exploited McCurdy’s body over the years, and applaud Dr. Noguchi who ordered, when McCurdy was finally buried in Oklahoma in 1977, that two feet of concrete be poured over his coffin so he could rest in peace. But, ultimately, we are voyeurs too: ogling his fate, both fascinated and repelled.

And so we come back to a production where the main character spends half of his time as a corpse. Other reviewers have asked: why not have the mummy sing? I feel like that is missing the point. If a corpse sings, it has agency. In death, none of us have agency – however much we’d like to believe otherwise.

Presumably, none of the audience watching on the evening I went will end up hanging in an amusement park when they expire. But every single one of us will die, one day. Therein lies Dead Outlaw’s poetry, buried among all the laughs and ribaldry. And the key to why we, like the people who once paid to see McCurdy’s mummified corpse, can’t look away.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.

Palm Beach is stuck in a gridlock

Palm Beach is never happier than when it’s making news – the more unexpected the better. The latest opportunity to pat itself on the back came in the wake of Palm Beach resident Donald J. Trump’s “silly” wheeze (according to the local paper) to make Canada the 51st state.

Whereas overall, as a result of President Trump’s speculations, visits to America by Canadians dropped by 2 percent in February – with a whopping 70 percent decline in bookings in March – reservations on flights from north of the 49th parallel to Palm Beach International Airport actually rose by 15 percent. The place remains popular, even for Canadians.

The Palm Beach Daily News has installed the ‘Trump Tracker,’ charting his every movement at Mar-a-Lago 

It’s not all good news, however. Since Trump entered office, the local newspaper, the Palm Beach Daily News, has installed a new feature called “Trump Tracker” so it can report on his every movement while he is at Mar-a-Lago, his “Southern White House.” One of the paper’s stories is that the “Trump Bump” – the surge in local property prices (property prices being the civic religion here) – is over. For a brief time, from his election until Easter, real estate enjoyed a brief boom – but no more.

But we shouldn’t get too excited. The Trump Bump was really a boom on top of a boom that has been going on since Covid, which brought many northerners, Midwesterners and San Franciscans to the Sunshine State. The number of single-family homes changing hands – apartments as well as houses – is up 60 percent year on year.

And how about this: to prove that buying and selling real estate beats working for a living, the latest news is that one property here, which sold in 2019 for an already very healthy $16 million, has just sold again, barely six years on, trebling in value to a staggering $48.5 million.

House prices are not the only thing jumping. The problem with Palm Beach – and it is becoming ever more acute – is that it is a sliver of an island, 12 miles long but only half a mile wide, connected to the mainland by three drawbridges that go up every half hour, with the roads held aloft, on average, for roughly 12 minutes. With the island being so popular, traffic has increased markedly: by no less than 100 percent in the past year and by a staggering 200 percent in the very center of town.

This increase has nothing to do with President Trump’s visits, which force the closure of some roads when he’s here, because the survey was taken while he was in Washington. This is putting increasing strain on the island’s roads, which are held at a standstill when the bridges are raised. Gridlock is virtually island-wide.

As a result, increasingly radical solutions are under consideration. One is that construction companies must shuttle their employees to and fro across the water in boats, so as not to use the roads joining the island and the mainland.

Another is to have a massive scheme of underground car parks sunk, more or less, across the entire island. But how long would those take to build – and where would the traffic go in the meantime?

A third is to ban all new private clubs (much in demand, so sought-after is the island), and to allow new restaurants to open only if they can convince the town council that they have adequate space for their valet-parking schemes.

The man chased after the ‘ding-dong-ditch’ pranksters in his Range Rover – and then pointed a gun at them

The shuttle scheme is being fiercely resisted by the construction companies, who say they are being unfairly targeted, and that it is the growth of tourism that is causing the traffic problems. To an extent, they have a point. Two new hotels have just been built, which of course are bringing in yet more tourists. The island has a finite surface area – and it is rapidly approaching saturation.

After cars, guns. This being America, like anywhere Palm Beach has an occasional problem with guns. Two episodes took place recently, the first when one driver annoyed another by switching lanes unexpectedly in the middle of town, only to have the “annoyed” driver pull a gun on him. No one was injured.

In the other case, a group of teens were playing a game called “ding-dong-ditch,” where someone rings a doorbell and then runs away, leaving the person answering it faced with thin air. However, this particular doorbell was fitted with a camera, which records all instances where someone rings the bell. And in this case, the teens later told the police that the man who lived at the house where they rang the bell rushed out and got into his Range Rover, drove after them, stopped them in the street and pointed his gun at them. The man was later directed to hand in his gun.

The Palm Beach teens were lucky. An 18-year-old died in Virginia in May after he was shot as part of a ding-dong-ditch prank that he had intended to post on TikTok. In 2020, three teens in California were killed after playing the same prank. A boy rang Anurag Chandra’s doorbell then dashed back to his friends, who were waiting in the dar. Chandra jumped into his car and gave chase, eventually ramming the boys off the road – and into a tree. Three of the six teens died. And in 2003, in Boca Raton, a 16-year-old was shot in the back playing the same game. The gunman, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter, was sentenced to 52 weekends in jail and ten years’ probation.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.

The origin of Father’s Day

On his first day in office, President Trump signed executive orders to end DEI. Schoolchildren nationwide know that he has failed to deliver, for every June they must participate in the celebration of a federal holiday that only entered the national consciousness thanks to endorsements from ACLU radicals and Big Business eager to make a buck. Ever since Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck in 2020, the children’s art instructor has forced them to write paeans to a petulant overweight drunk. I’m speaking, of course, of Father’s Day.

Father’s Day began in Washington State as a church service orchestrated by Sonora Smart Dodd, an adoring daughter who wanted to honor Dad for not falling to pieces when Mom died. It was such a hit that organizers moved it to the state capitol in June 1910. Woodrow Wilson took a break from his New Jersey gubernatorial run to unfurl the flag for the event.

It was only a matter of time before other progressive busybodies took notice. By 1911, ACLU co-founder Jane Addams was lamenting that “Poor father has been left out in the cold. He doesn’t get much recognition. But regardless of his bread-earning proclivities, it would be a good thing if he had a day that would mean recognition of him.” Two years after Chicago celebrated its first Mother’s Day, lawmakers laughed off Addams’s proposal.

The Spokane event certainly left an impression on Wilson, who had traded the executive mansion at Princeton University for the one in Trenton before settling in the Oval Office in 1913. Running for reelection in 1916 and having already established Mother’s Day nationwide, he decided the country needed a new holiday in June. He thought back to Washington State and the fanfare that had greeted him there. “I therefore suggest and request that throughout the nation and if possible in every community the 14th day of June be observed as Flag Day,” he wrote. He celebrated the second annual Flag Day by signing the 1917 Espionage Act, which locked up so many commies and pacifists and social activists that Addams and her fellow commie pacifist social activists launched the ACLU.

Civic associations wanted in on the game so they could associate more civically. Harry C. Meek, a member of the Chicago Business Circle, stole Addams’s idea and claimed it as his own in 1915; it took five years of lobbying to bribe the aldermen and ward bosses into celebrating Father’s Day. The first citywide celebration took place on the third Sunday of June, which coincidentally was Meek’s birthday.

How could a society that had just banned alcohol call itself pro-father?

Calvin Coolidge had a special place in his heart for the Windy City. The Vermont farmer’s son forced his way on to Warren Harding’s ticket as an antidote to the blatant corruption atop the ballot. By 1924, Harding was dead amid corruption allegations and humble Silent Cal was campaigning for president. By this point the Chicago Business Circle (motto: “You Scratch My Back, I’ll Scratch Yours”) had rebranded as the Lions Club International (motto: “We Serve”). Meek came calling: “Say, Cal, you could use a new June holiday. It’d help people forget about the Teapot Dome and all.” Coolidge mustered all the sentiment he could in a letter to the club that was leaked to the press as an endorsement: “The widespread observance of this occasion is calculated to establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children and to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations.”

Dodd had tasted political success as a volunteer at the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, but by the 1920s had abandoned hope for a federal holiday. She left Spokane to go study ceramics at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her pessimism was warranted. Not even an endorsement from the president was enough to merit mention in the New York Times. And how could a society that had just banned alcohol call itself pro-father?

The first Father’s Day reflected Dodd’s sentimentality for her widower father. The Episcopalians who came to her parish’s 1909 service, wore roses: red to honor living dads and white for those who had gone to their eternal reward. It took a Pennsylvania men’s Bible study to recognize the self-sabotage of sentiment. The Martin W. Callener Bible Class declared the dandelion the official Father’s Day flower: “the more it is trampled on, the more it grows.” That joke got the attention of the Times.

It would take another 46 years, but we fathers eventually did get a DEI holiday to call our own thanks to a president running for re-election. “In fatherhood we know the elemental magic and joy of humanity… Let each American make this Father’s Day an occasion for renewal of the love and gratitude we bear to our fathers, increasing and enduring through all the years,” Lions Club member Richard Nixon declared in a presidential proclamation.

The first nationwide Father’s Day was celebrated on June 18, 1972 – hours after five men were arrested for breaking into DNC headquarters at the Watergate Hotel.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.

Remembering Jackson C. Frank

Before venturing to the North Park Theatre in Buffalo to catch a one-night-only showing of Blues Run the Game: The Strange Tale of Jackson C. Frank, the new documentary about the Queen City’s doomed native-son folksinger, I shared Frank’s most famous number, “Blues Run the Game,” with our friend Pat.

“That could be the saddest song I’ve ever heard,” she said. Yet Frank wrote it during his very brief wine, women and musical heyday. One shudders to imagine what he composed as an obese, one-eyed, homeless paranoid-schizophrenic.

Frank’s western New York contemporary, the novelist John Gardner, said that “art begins in a wound, an imperfection, and is an attempt either to learn to live with the wound or to heal it. It is the pain of the wound which impels the artist to do his work.” Frank suffered his impelling – but immedicable – wound in sixth grade. On March 31, 1954, a furnace exploded in Cleveland Hill Elementary School in the working-class suburb of Cheektowaga. Fifteen children were killed and as many others were badly burned in one of the deadliest American school fires of the 20th century.

Within a year of the album’s release, Frank was in a mental hospital. His descent into the maelstrom was rapid

A young Frank was among the survivors, but he never really recovered. Burns seared and scarred more than half his body. The pain was excruciating; for the rest of his life he would hobble with a pronounced limp. But he learned to play guitar and his wound suppurated melancholy lyrics. Upon reaching adulthood, Jackson received his insurance settlement and took a boat to England, where he proceeded to blow a good chunk of that windfall buying Bentleys, Jaguars, Aston Martins and every guitar he could get his gnarled fingers on. British folkies – half of whom were communists, laughs guitarist John Renbourn in the documentary – were bemused by Frank’s gluttony, but he’d done his time on the cross.

Frank’s eponymous 1965 album, produced in England by Paul Simon, was a succès d’estime, cherished by the cognoscenti but unbought by the great unwashed. “Blues Run the Game” would later be covered by Simon and Garfunkel, Nick Drake and many others, but Jackson never made another record.

The fire casts an eerie glow over the album. In “Marlene,” a monody for the puppy-love classmate who perished on that horrible day, he sings his survivor’s guilt: “And though the fire had burned her life out/ It left me little more/ I am a crippled singer/ And it evens up the score.”

Within a year of the album’s release Frank was in a mental hospital. He repatriated shortly thereafter, and his descent into the maelstrom was rapid and irreversible. The bright American light in the burgeoning English folk scene – boyfriend of Sandy Denny of Fairport Convention, whose “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” may be the second saddest song of that era – became a babbling schizophrenic, hearing disembodied voices and living on the streets, whether in his adopted home of Woodstock or in New York City.

Extant footage of Frank is scant, so the documentary, directed by Frenchman Damien Aimé Dupont, relies upon interviews with old friends and musical chums, among them Al “Year of the Cat” Stewart and John Kay of Steppenwolf. Paul Simon refused to cooperate with the documentarian or with Frank’s biographer, Jim Abbott. He is a rock, all right.

A year or so ago I sat in our local museum and listened to John Zach, a Buffalo radio personality of my youth, discuss his book about the Cleveland Hill fire. He spoke more about the technical aspects of the fire than the human stories, but I couldn’t blame him: those stories – of children banging frantically on windows as the flames consumed them – are unbearably grim.

During the Q&A session a quiet, well-dressed man in the back of the room stood and announced, in a barely audible voice, “I was there.” He was a classmate of Frank’s who had walked down the annex hallway 15 minutes before the furnace exploded and a conflagration engulfed that part of the school. Speaking hesitantly between sobs, he said that something had seemed off that morning – there was a smoky smell – and for the past 70 years he had tormented himself with the possibility of what could have happened if only he’d told the custodian or principal. More survivor’s guilt, I suppose, though I doubt that an 11-year-old’s vague sense that something was wrong would have been credited, and in any event contemporaneous newspaper accounts confirm that others, too, had detected an odor.

Listening to this man was rather like sitting in the audience of a talk about the Titanic in 1982 and hearing someone blurt, “I was on the Titanic.” Frank escaped the immediate catastrophe, but his lifeboat capsized far too soon.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.

Doctor Who needs a break

Twenty years on from its spectacular revival it looks like Doctor Who might not be returning to our screens again in the immediate future. I haven’t actually watched Doctor Who for a long time, but because I wrote an awful lot of it for years – on TV, but also books, comics, radio plays, yogurt pot labels, you name it – people always ask me what I think should become of it. My answer? I’d cancel it and flee for the hills.

Twenty years is an incredible run, almost equalling its original marathon from 1963 to 1989. In TV parlance, it needs to be ‘rested’.

Stepping back from a thing enables you to see it from the outside, which has been quite a jolt. I’ve seen Doctor Who whizzing by from the corner of my eye for years now, the way others see it. From that buzzards-eye view it seems like absolute screaming madness.

When any long-running endeavour hits trouble, you have an opportunity to really peer at its fundamentals. What is it for? Who is it for? Is it worth all our bother? Like the Conservative party, Doctor Who is a lingering institution fashioned in, and for, a lost age. Perhaps we need a Badenoch-style analysis of what went wrong?

Firstly, and it seems incredible it should be necessary to say this, but Doctor Who does not contain the meaning of life. It should never go anywhere near the profound, except in the lightest, most playful terms. There is nothing wrong or small about being a weekend treat that’s mainly for children and indulgent parents. There are many slight, passing things that enhance life, but we don’t look to bouncy castles or trips to the zoo to reveal the secrets of existence, or politics, or anything else.

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Doctor Who was born in an age when we didn’t need to rabbit on about our ‘values’, and certainly not in our pulp pop culture. Looking back twenty years on, its revival in 2005 as a prestige production was a warning sign that something was very wrong with the TV industry in general, as if Basil Brush was back but written by Dennis Potter and freighted with mortal significance. In its original run, it had the unique ability to lift up TV writer ‘hacks’, and make them fly a little; the revival sometimes seemed to have the reverse effect.

It is unique in several ways. It is not another ‘sci-fi’ in the accepted sense, more a very peculiar genre of its own. And it is absolutely not a saga, more a fun trip somewhere new every story. My iron law of Doctor Who is that if something carries over from one story to any other (barring the Daleks), it’s almost always going to be a bucket of incomprehensible nonsense. But that picaresque, fly-by-night quality at the core of the thing is anathema to modern TV, which is all about sagas, journeys and arcs.

To be fair the makers of Doctor Who tried to pare it back to basics in 2018 for the first series featuring Jodie Whittaker, but it unfortunately just wasn’t good enough. When that didn’t set the world alight, they panicked and threw the kitchen sink of the series’ baffling history and lore at it, to ever diminishing returns.

Another issue is Dr Who himself. He is not a character part, but a personality part. He is loveable and fun to watch, with entertainingly naughty and askew interactions (Tom Baker and Matt Smith did this particularly well). You can run a show for years on that simple basis, refreshed for a new generation of youngsters with a new actor every few years. A few gags, a few scares for the kiddies, end of.

But if you treat the Doctor as an acting part, which we did, you very swiftly run out of new things to say, and he becomes a pompous, maudlin berk. The whole affair starts to revolve around him, as a fetish – everyone starts up with cod poetry dialogue – ‘he’s like ice, fire, rain and stars etc etc’. He just can’t take that weight (and see also James Bond and Batman). Angst and the Doctor just doesn’t ring true, and pretty much nobody tunes in to see him all of a tear-stained dither.

This show is meant to be a treat for the young at heart, a liberation from the drudgery of work and school. It is absolutely not for its obsessives. They will always watch, even if – especially if – they hate it, and are the very last people to be catered to. ‘Content’ that drives social media ‘engagement’ is the wild goose of the modern TV industry; having a silo of a few thousand tweeting nutters makes absolutely no difference to your bottom line, and they scare ‘normies’ off your brand.

Because Doctor Who is for everybody. One fine, far-off day somebody may remember that, and – though it seems impossible right now – it could thrive again, in whatever shape the media takes in the future. But I’m afraid the Tardis needs a prolonged period among the mothballs.

Is everything political?

I first heard the slogan “Everything is political” from a left-wing reporter for Wyoming’s statewide newspaper in the mid-1980s, at least a decade before I became acquainted with the work of the revolutionary Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, deviser of the strategy known as the “long march through the institutions” of the West. While the right clearly has no choice but to fight fire with fire in the struggle against its ideological and political adversaries, the fact remains that the left has substantially won the battle by having helped to transform a slogan into present reality.

The idea of everything as politics, and politics as everything, is ideology in its purest form. In the West, the Anglosphere especially, politics has become nearly everything – arguably more all-encompassing than sports. Nearly the whole of western culture today is conducted with ultimate reference to politics: social and sexual relations, education, the arts, the sciences, business, entertainment – everything.

The Republicans’ victories in last year’s elections and the return of Donald Trump to the White House guaranteed that the ideological society will be the future for so long as anyone can foresee: a prospect which appeals exclusively to the minority of people popularly known as political junkies. For the rest of us – those who regard politics as a basically low-though-necessary business that in a truly civilized society would be ranked more or less on a level with the humdrum mechanics of life – it is a vision of hell on Earth.

Americans in Alexis de Tocqueville’s day were intrigued by politics and spent much of their free time discussing and debating it in an era when only urban communities received news from beyond their locality promptly and regularly, and news from abroad at monthly or even greater intervals. The vote, expanded from a system based on property qualifications to universal suffrage, encouraged citizens to consider staying abreast of the public business as a patriotic duty and a means to promote their personal, social and economic interests.

But since the early decades of the 20th century, universal education; a growing fascination with new political and social ideas and theories from Europe (most of them incompatible with the British political tradition inherited from the mother country); the development of mass and eventually almost instant communications; the displacement of Christianity by secular and civic religion and the worship of “the future” perverted a popular fascination into what ultimately became a clinical obsession.

The process was further promoted by the fragmentation, balkanization and disorientation of American society by federal immigration policy in the 20th and 21st centuries, resulting in a multicultural nation – an obvious contradiction in terms – in which each of the various ethnic, racial and cultural elements (save perhaps the original one) understands politics as a way to settle old scores, achieve political and social domination and take revenge on its past “oppressors.”

The world is, always was and always will be largely ungovernable and chaotic in one way or anothe

In America today, peace and stability at every level of society are a near impossibility, as are sustained mental concentration and emotional tranquility. “Everything is political” – and so every element of what was formerly a widely accepted world has become something to challenge; every position a hill to die on; every statement one to dispute; every certainty a belief to question and undermine through governmental effort; the traditional and the social media where none of the participants ever takes a break or a breath and none ever sleeps; the NGOs; and so on… and on.

“The world is too much with us,” wrote William Wordsworth in 1802. At least his world, at the start of the Industrial Revolution, was still the real one, unlike our own, which is being remade as a virtual world of artificial images; of ideological constructs instead of philosophical ideas and fictional “narratives” substituted for historical accounts; of illusory issues for matters of genuine public import and significance.

Tocqueville could not have imagined ordinary men and women eager to follow, minute by minute, if and when the US Secretary of Defense is to be fired, what the tariff rate on Britain or China will be tomorrow, whether the sales of an experimental car are rising or falling this week, or what Donald Trump’s last word on the future of Canada is. As Raymond Chandler said in another context, too many good men have been dead for too long for any of this to matter. Let the so-called experts worry about such issues. They are always full of brilliant ideas and solutions, of course, most of which when implemented prove to have been the wrong ones – not that they care much afterward when the public has forgotten about them anyway, often by the start of the next news cycle.

The world is, always was and always will be largely ungovernable and chaotic, if not in one way, then in another. As the leftists say, “Get used to it!” and “Find a life!”

Meantime, springtime has come to Wyoming and I’ll be on my way shortly into the wilderness again – the real world, as I see and care about it – when the spring runoff is complete, mud season is over, the elk have returned to the high country and I’m drinking whiskey over a campfire again.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.

Hamit Coskun’s life will only get harder now

Hamit Coskun has been found guilty of a ‘religiously-motivated public order offence’, after he burnt a Quran in front of the Turkish embassy in London. This is Britain’s first formal capitulation to Islamic blasphemy laws. Not only does it suggest that Islam deserves special protection against sacrilege, and shielding from the freedom to offend, but it also rewards the radical Muslims for exercising violence against expressions of irreverence.

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In accordance with the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Public Order Act 1986, Coskun was found guilty of disorderly behaviour ‘within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress,’ motivated by ‘hostility towards members of a religious group, namely followers of Islam.’

Here is what happened, as described in the court’s judgement. Coskun burnt a Quran, ‘held the burning book aloft’ and shouted ‘Islam is the religion of terrorists’ and ‘the Quran is burning’. A man then came out from an adjacent property, called Coskun a ‘fucking idiot’ and said he was going to kill him. The man ‘launched a savage attack on [Coskun]… and kicked and spat at [him].’

The judgement continues: ‘What made his conduct disorderly was the timing and location of the conduct and that all this was accompanied by abuse language… That the conduct was disorderly is not better illustrated than by the fact that it led to serious public disorder involving him being assaulted by two different people.’

The court’s verdict, like the blasphemy laws in the Muslim world, seems to uphold the idea that the ‘disorder’ caused by any expression against Islam – here the burning of the holy book of the religion – is the fault of the person exercising that expression, and not the individual or group responding aggressively.

Islamist leaders have long championed a global blasphemy law. I remember a few years ago when Imran Khan said he wanted Muslim countries to enforce trade boycotts on countries where blasphemous ‘incidents’ occurred. Finally, in a different form, the Islamists may be getting what they want.

Britain, of course, isn’t the only European country to have suppressed its commitment to freedom of speech in recent times. In 2023, Denmark took a relatively more straightforward route by passing a law banning ‘inappropriate treatment’ of religious texts to counter violence emanating from the believers of only one particular religious text.

While Sweden didn’t carry out a legislative abandonment of its commitment to free speech, it effectively carried out the same last year by charging Quran-burners with ‘hate crimes’ against Muslims, treating Muslims as an ‘ethnic group’. One of those charged, Salwan Momika, was found murdered in his Stockholm apartment in January. Unfortunately, it was only after the sharia penalty for blasphemy against Islam had been extrajudicially meted out to Momika that the charges against him were dropped by the Swedish court.

More than the £240 fine he is officially charged with, Coskun has been sentenced to a life fearing death at the hands of those Muslims who feel vindicated by another European court deeming the burning of paper as an assault on human beings. The fact that he is of Armenian and Kurdish heritage, two communities that have faced scores of brutalities at the hands of the Turkish Islamist regimes, will make his life harder still.

I tried the world’s worst drink

I am standing in a sunny courtyard in the little town of Gijduvan, waiting for a drink. Just in case you don’t know, Gijduvan is a way station on the old Silk Road, in the far west of Uzbekistan: it is known for ceramics, Sufi mystics and loud celebrations of the Persian spring festival, Nowruz.

As part of this festival, the locals make a special soup/beverage called sumalak. The recipe, I’m told, dates to Zoroastrian times – more than 3,000 years ago – and includes “wheat sprouts,” “cottonseed oil” and, I am not joking, “stones.” I can already see the sumalak bubbling away in a vast steel pot. It looks like viscous brown cow slurry. To be honest, I’m not brimming with eagerness. And so, to pass the time as I wait to try this probably horrible drink, I find myself pondering the taxonomy of horrible drinks. What, exactly, are the worst drinks in the world?

Finally, we come to the mindbenders. The mad alcohols. Here, I have quite wide personal experience

Broadly speaking, they fall into three camps. First the “traditional” or national drinks: beloved locally, baffling to outsiders. Then the medicinal concoctions – tonics, tinctures and toxic herbal brews. And finally, the bruisers: drinks where taste is deemed irrelevant so long as they get you smashed. It’s in that last category that I genuinely believe I can name the very worst drink in the world. But before we reach that nadir, let’s begin with the native horrors.

The worst “local” drink I’ve ever had is chicha. This is a time-honored refresher imbibed across South America, but especially in the rainforests of Peru, Brazil and beyond. It can be made from maize, or maybe manioc, cassava or peanuts. In its fermented style it is essentially beer – and that’s how I tried it, when it was handed to me in a big mug by a smiling friend in a brilliantly exotic market, in the Peruvian Amazon jungle city of Iquitos.

What’s so bad about that – a nice cold beer in a hot, sweaty jungle? After watching me down the drink, my friend casually explained how chicha is traditionally made. In short: the maize is chewed by old ladies, who then spit the masticated wads into a bucket. Naturally occurring enzymes in human saliva do the work of breaking the starches into fermentable sugars – thus creating alcohol. Cleverly, my friend waited until I’d swallowed the last drop of old-lady-spit-beer before revealing all this. Otherwise, I too might have asked for a bucket.

Can anything rival chicha in this category? One obvious contender is kumiss, the central Asian staple made by fermenting mare’s milk. This seems to be either loved or hated. Mainly hated. Then there’s pulque, the ancient agave drink of Mexico. A well-traveled friend once described this as tasting like “a frogspawn smoothie.” We should also give an honorable mention to yak butter tea – a salty, smoky mixture of black tea and, well, yak butter.

Onward to the health drinks. In this column we place all those bracing fluids that usually come from odd parts of Europe. Jägermeister is the best known, but there are many more. One friend swears that Riga Black Balsam is appalling. Others claim that Chicago’s Malört is the Voldemort of revivers; a famous description says it has “the aroma and flavor of an open grave.” Nor should we forget all the mineral waters from spas that taste of salt or sulfur – why do we believe that the worse a health drink tastes, the healthier it must be? I am told “Franz Josef Bitter Water” is the nadir in this category. At least the branding is honest.

Finally, we come to the mindbenders. The mad alcohols. Here I have quite a wide-ranging personal experience. It was I, for instance, that invented the cocktail known as a Grapple. This is three shots of grappa mixed with a cold can of Red Bull (themselves two of the worst drinks in the world). I contrived it on a hot day in Venice when I simultaneously wanted something cold, something to pick me up and something to get me hammered. It’s vile, as you expect, but after three Grapples I was ready to swim the Grand Canal.

A quick poll of friends produces many contenders in this intoxicant category. Limoncello. Nigerian-brewed export Guinness. Fernet-Branca. “American beer 20 years ago.” Korean Soju (I can vouch for this being repulsive). Chinese Baijiu. Ayahuasca.

Julian complained that he’d woken up cold and alone, with a goat chewing at his camera

However, I know of one drink which can trump all these. It’s called “posh.” My one and only encounter with posh went like this. I was in Chiapas State in southern Mexico with a friend, Julian. One Sunday we visited an indigenous village called San Juan Chamula. When we got there, they were having a festival outside their weird church (where they seemed to be worshipping the sun). They were also serving posh – a brutal wood alcohol decanted from steel drums into old Coke bottles. So we bought a few, for pennies each, and drank them and got dangerously drunk in around five minutes. At that point I started doing a solo dance routine in the town square.

Soon after this we both lapsed into a booze-induced coma and I woke up at about 6 p.m. as it was getting dark. Julian seemed to be dead alongside me, so I left him and fled on the last truck. As I escaped, I told people the problem – “My friend is dead” – but I got the Spanish wrong and was saying “My friend is Death.” Which didn’t help.

Happily, Julian showed up three hours later complaining that he’d woken up cold and alone, with a goat chewing at his camera, and that I’d “left him for dead.” I wasn’t in a position to argue. Indeed, the whole experience was not edifying – but it was, I believe, an encounter with the worst drink in the world. Because I’ve later learned that this Mexican moonshine regularly kills people.

And what about the sumalak? Here in Gijduvan I have reached the end of the line. The nice Uzbek lady fills my little cup with the esoteric Zoroastrian beverage. I sip it, warily. It tastes very old, very strange, very malty, not very nice – and about a million times better than posh.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.

How I flouted a cardinal French gardening rule

“C’est ma faute,” I called up to the local old boys as they strolled past my potager, chuckling among themselves. I tried to match their levity, but it was obviously affected; they could sense my panic. It was late-April and my garden resembled an eccentrically out-of-season Halloween scene, with tomato plants standing eerily motionless like infant ghosts, wrapped from head to toe in protective fleece.

Everyone knows that 41°F is too cold for tomatoes, but spring had been deceptively warm, and I couldn’t help myself. AccuWeather had issued a grim prediction for the night’s minimum temperature. Only a few days previously, I had been openly proud that my plants had been in the ground for two weeks. I felt foolish and impetuous.

It’s only a matter of time before some local wag tries to diminish my dominance, citing climate change

You see, I had flouted a cardinal French gardening rule. It was still more than two weeks until the Saints de Glace, the three mid-May feast days that cultivators of warm-season crops have watched for centuries. Only after “Saint Servais has sung” (May 13) should any sane gardener even think about planting out tender crops such as tomatoes, eggplants and zucchinis, lest they perish under a late frost. My neighbors, I suspected, had been quietly waiting – perhaps even willing – for me to fail.

I wouldn’t have described the British as an optimistic bunch before moving to the south of France. But it’s only when you live somewhere with more than 300 sunny days a year that you retrospectively appreciate the mental fortitude Britain’s climate demands.

Growing up in middle England, I had come to associate sunshine with happiness, leading me to naively assume that the southern French must enjoy a naturally upbeat disposition. Wrong. In fact, my tendency to look on the bright side often renders my fellow villagers suspicious and uncomfortable.

Even non-gardeners felt compelled to remind me about the Saints de Glace, taking it upon themselves to issue dire warnings. Most of these je-sais-touts have never sprouted a broccoli seed and wouldn’t recognize an organic soil amendment if it were liberally smeared across their faces, yet they don’t miss a beat in dishing out horticultural advice. Over the years, I’ve learned to just smile and nod. On verra. There’s no point arguing. What’s more, my French isn’t up to it. I must let my plants do the talking.

And so, a little after midnight, armed with two five-gallon cans of scalding hot water, I wheeled them down through the gloom. My squeaking wheelbarrow did its best to betray my stealth and the steep inclines threatened to tip me over, but I eventually made it to my patch. I had calculated that ten gallons of 185°F water would emit around 12,000 BTUs of much-needed heat over five or six hours. Enough, with luck, to create a small protective microclimate around my tomato ghosts, bolstered by their fleeces, until the sun rose the next day. These are the lengths to which I go to be the glitch in the French matrix. I can’t let the naysayers win.

By morning, I was back at the garden, casually moving my hot water bottles out of view before anyone noticed. The plants looked absolutely fine. My Bluetooth thermometer – tucked discreetly in a nearby tree – reported that it only gone down to 47°F. The old boys shuffled past again, their faces unreadable. One grunted a greeting at me. I muttered a casual “jour,” leaving the bon unsaid, like a man too busy succeeding to bother with formalities.

I finished unwrapping my spectral tomato plants, feeling slightly foolish for having lost my horticultural cool. Damn you, AccuWeather. Perhaps, I mused, the Saints de Glace are not really about frost at all. Maybe they are a kind of cultural insurance against rashness – an institutionalized warning not to get ideas above one’s station, horticulturally or otherwise. Naturally, I disregarded such a warning completely.

Still, as I secured an apical growth tip and marveled at the almost indecently vigorous leaves on my cerise noires, I allowed myself a small, private gloat. My plants were weeks ahead, and though Saint Mamert, Saint Pancrace and Saint Servais had yet to clear their throats to sing, my tomatoes were already humming. AccuWeather, if it can still be trusted, says I’m in the clear.

That said, it’s only a matter of time before some local wag tries to diminish my dominance – citing climate change, or chalking it up to English eccentricity. I shall, as ever, feign a look of mild surprise and murmur something vague about favorable microclimates. It seems to work. After all, in a land ruled by saints and skeptics, a little heresy goes a long way.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.

The joy of preparing freezer jam

July, and the morning sun blazes over fields of pick-your-own strawberries. The black bears scope out the blueberry patches in the national parks. Skin-destroying raspberry canes trail across the path, ready to spring out and scratch the faces of passers-by.

The berrying season is upon us: scratched faces and stained clothing are on the cards. Have you ever seen a child pack a handful of wild raspberries away into a shirt pocket for safe keeping? I hope so. It’s one of the joys of life. Their faces, on seeing the inevitable results, are completely worth the ruined outfit.

However, if you don’t have any young relatives to cheer you up with their berrying misadventures, pick-your-own farms aren’t just pick-your-owns but pick-me-ups. There’s something so virtuous about going out to the fields with baskets and pails, filling them with fresh fruit plucked straight from the plant and bringing them home to your family. You feel like a Pilgrim Father (or Mother) surviving off the land. Canny self-reliance – meet frontiersmanship.

It’s a law of nature that once you’re in the field you feel obligated to pick for an hour or so. You aren’t going to go to all that effort for a measly pint of berries, are you? If you were surrounded by gold ingots, would you stop at a handful? And then there’s the peer pressure of your fellow pickers. They obviously know what’s up – look at their professional bandanas – and they’re filling bucket after gallon bucket. How can you help but do the same?

Strawberry freezer jam for me represents the taste of one childhood summer spent at the lake

When you get home, you survey the heaps of glowing, red, sun-ripened strawberries on the counter with great satisfaction: the literal fruits of your labors. Your kitchen never looked so good. The first evening you have them with a little cream for dessert, savoring their sweet deliciousness. In the morning, you add them to yogurt.

You take a few for lunch. You make a strawberry rhubarb pie. If you’re really on a roll, you make strawberry ice cream. And then the righteous glow begins to fade. The strawberries start going dark in patches. Their once-glossy surfaces wilt, the little yellow seeds shrink back into the skin. You contemplate the scene with the creeping feeling that you may have overdone it a little on the picking.

Real domestic divas would, of course, have immediately hulled and frozen three-quarters of their harvest on returning home, apportioning it into neatly labeled Ziploc bags to supply the family with fruit for the rest of the calendar year. But if, like me, you didn’t do that, you’re now three days in thinking, “What on earth am I going to do with all this fruit?”

The answer? Jam. Like charity, it covers a multitude of sins. It matters not how tired your strawberries, how sad your raspberries, how droopy your blueberries. In jam, their shortcomings are hidden and their best selves brought to light and preserved, maybe not for posterity, but at least for Sunday breakfast.

Jam is an umbrella term for a whole family of toast toppings. Technically, jam is made with crushed fruit; jelly is made with the juice strained from fruit and preserves are made with whole fruit. They all contain added sugar, which is important since it acts as a preservative and helps the pectin gel more firmly. Without added sugar, they turn into fruit spreads. If you purée them, presto, they turn into fruit butter.

All these preparations require cooking. But there’s one kind of jam that doesn’t: freezer jam. It’s often recommended as the place to start in the world of preserves, because the process is a bit less intimidating. It’s also fast to make. And, best of all, it’s delicious.

When I think back over the homemade jams I’ve enjoyed in the past, one stands head and shoulders above the rest: strawberry freezer jam, the taste of one childhood summer spent at the lake. We had it on toast in the morning and on salty soda crackers in the afternoon, and we couldn’t get enough of it. We used to check the freezer to see how many jars we had left.

It was just like eating crushed sugared strawberries fresh off the plant: pure heaven. Because the berries aren’t cooked, the strawberry flavors stay much fresher than traditional jam. The color stays bright red for the same reason. Blue sunlit water and fragrant, bright red jam: summer bliss.

Do children steal jam anymore? Or is that a thing of the past? In one of the Anne of Green Gables books – Anne of Avonlea – an enterprising young lad named Davy is discovered up to his ears in a jar of Marilla’s famous yellow plum preserves. Anne sits him down for a talk. “Davy Keith, don’t you know that it is very wrong of you to be eating that jam, when you were told never to meddle with anything in that closet?”

“Yes, I knew it was wrong,” admits Davy uncomfortably, “but plum jam is awful nice, Anne. I just peeped in and it looked so good I thought I’d take just a weeny taste. I stuck my finger in and licked it clean. And it was so much gooder than I’d ever thought that I got a spoon and just sailed in.”

After a firm lecture, Davy repents and accepts the rules on jam in this world. But he holds out hope for the next. “Anyhow, there’ll be plenty of jam in heaven, that’s one comfort,” he says, complacently. Anne is a bit puzzled at that one.

“Why, it’s in the catechism,” says Davy.

“Oh, no, there is nothing like that in the catechism, Davy,” says Anne.

“But I tell you there is,” persists Davy. “It was in that question Marilla taught me last Sunday. ‘Why should we love God?’ It says, ‘Because He makes preserves, and redeems us.’ Preserves is just a holy way of saying jam.”

Some technicalities, both of grammar and culinary jargon, may have escaped Davy. But his heart is most definitely in the right place – along with his taste in jam.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.

The decadence of seafood towers

Whether or not it is your intention to see and be seen, you cannot avoid the latter when you order a seafood tower. I can say this definitively, having experienced one side more than the other – the mere glimpse of a spire of glistening seafood floating through the brasserie will not only draw the attention of fellow diners, but stir up burning envy in their hearts.

The seafood tower takes the experience of eating an oyster and scales it up tenfold into an exercise in excess, sometimes three or more tiers high.

The oyster has her rightful place on the ice, of course, but we find her alongside her sisters: a bevy of clams, scallops en masse, a bowl of jewel-bright tuna, an army of shrimps cocktail, a collection of mussels and the pièce de résistance, a lovely whole lobster or crab complete with all its tasty garnishes – warm butter, creamy mayonnaise, yellow lemons cut like stars.

The responsibility of cracking open a crab leg is left to a gallant sir or madam

Without compromise or apology, the seafood tower invites you and your dining companions to partake with no guilt, and all others to look on with envy. How many times have I sufficed myself alone at the bar with a bowl of shoestring fries, comforting myself with tales of the joy of simplicity when my true craving lay with copious friends and a bounty of fish?

A friend remarked to me recently that Americans have been craving simple, traditional foods after the rise and sustained dominance of experimental fusion cuisine and the relative austerity of the pandemic years (see the recent popularity of New York institutions such as Bemelmans Bar and the Chelsea Hotel).

She suggested there is a particular interest in the kind of uncomplicated and aesthetically pleasing food and drink that sustains a patio culture: think of afternoons spent lounging with friends in front of a sunlit body of water, sipping some fizzy beverage and chatting about nothing of consequence. The seafood tower is neither uncomplicated nor humble; it is by definition a showstopper with a price point to match. But in many ways, it is the pinnacle of this renewed social ideal; a surfeit of undersea riches strewn about in picture-perfect array – always consumed among friends – and thus a perfect representation of abundance on every level.

The American cioppino, Provençal bouillabaisse and Italian insalata di mare also offer a cornucopia of fish in a dish, but none carry the same punch as the tower. The seafood tower is elevated from its parboiled and braised brethren by pure concentrated decadence. The conceit of the presentation is almost too much – as if every shellfish in the sea came from afar, pried themselves open and offered themselves up for consumption.

It’s as if every shellfish in the sea came from afar, pried themselves open and offered themselves up for consumption

In some cases, accoutrements are offered alongside and the responsibility of cracking open a crab leg is left to a gallant sir or madam. But these functions take on the veneer of perfunctory performance rather than anything real. Most of the labor behind the composition is artfully hidden – the shellfish selected, ideally, hours earlier and the corporal labor of shucking, deveining and claw-cracking performed far from view.

Hands-on shellfish work is left to the setting of more rustic fare like the summer crab boil. And only the summer crab boil can compete with the tower, containing roughly all the main elements and retaining the communal aspect while remaining wholly unpretentious. One imagines dropping three whole platters into a pot and boiling them down, before scattering mussels and langoustines across old newspaper and tearing them apart with a beer in one hand and cracked shells in the other. Much messier and much more fun.

Still, these sorts of dishes are not for everyone. For some, the seafood tower is a gauche, nouveau riche display, closer to gold-leafed foie gras than a clambake. For others, the variety of either the seafood boil or tower is simply too much. “Maybe it’s a little too real,” said a friend, an experienced fisherman. “Sort of feels like, ‘let’s just dump the bucket in the pot and dust it with Old Bay.’ I prefer weird food items to be singled out and left unmolested.”

In Paris recently, on a mission to find an illustrative example for this piece, I suggested to my friends the buzzy seafood spot Clamato (chic green decor, tie-dye-shirt waitstaff, and a line out the door – don’t miss it) and ordered a plateau de fruits de mer without consultation as I knew my companions were raw-food-averse.

I hoped and trusted that the head-turning presentation and the ambiance of the city of love would do enough to assuage their fears and convince them to try – at bare minimum – a little clam.

When the platter came out, crab sawn in half and displayed guts-side out, I knew I would not be successful. But in any case, the wine and bread were very good, I enjoyed more clams than I deserved to have on my own and my friends ate accordingly. C’est la mer qu’on voit danser.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.

Wine highlights from a weekend shooting party

Do you know Charlotte Mulliner’s charming poem “Good Gnus”? It was transcribed by P.G. Wodehouse in his short story “Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court.” I went shooting with friends last weekend at a magnificent rural fastness in a semi-secure, undisclosed location near Millbrook, New York. Although we were shooting clays, not pheasants or other fauna, the opening of “Good Gnus” nevertheless floated into my mind like a tocsin with its irrefragable psychological insight.

When cares attack and life seems black, 
How sweet it is to pot a yak,        
Or puncture hares and grizzly bears,             
And others I could mention;        
But in my Animals “Who’s Who”                 
No name stands higher than the Gnu;              
And each new gnu that comes in view          
Receives my prompt attention.

The poem has a happy ending, too – always assuming that you are not yourself a gnu:

A brief suspense, and then at last             
The waiting’s o’er, the vigil past;
A careful aim. A spurt of flame.  
It’s done. You’ve pulled the trigger,              
And one more gnu, so fair and frail,              
Has handed in its dinner-pail…

It was while lining up for our dinner – which is to say for our lunch – pail that those cheerful lines echoed, unbidden in my memory. We had a choice between mushroom soup and a Bibb lettuce salad to start and beef and Cobb salad as the main event.

Which brings me to my main event, videlicet, the wine. We inaugurated the repast with a delightful 2019 Puligny-Montrachet from Olivier Leflaive, offshoot of the storied Domaine Leflaive, a conspicuous star in the diadem of Burgundy producers. It was everything you would expect from this great wine-producing region in the Côte de Beaune: heady, aromatic nose, complex on the tongue, lingering, taut-but-buttery finish. Adding palpably to pleasure (as well as to the appreciation) was the price. At about $100, it was perhaps 30 percent below retail. 

The same was true of the 2006 (!) Château Pape Clément. Indeed, I doubt you could find the wine for less than $150, but the sage managers of our refectory offered it to us hungry shooters for a mere $100.

I have written about this ancient Pessac-Léognan wine before in these chronicles.

Planted in 1300, the vineyard is by some measure the oldest in all of Bordeaux. Back then, much of the Médoc was still but a swamp. The reigning archbishop of Bordeaux, one Bertrand de Goth, was given the vineyard by his brother Berald. Bertrand took the name Clement V when he ascended to the papacy in 1305 and gave his name to the vineyard, passing it along to the new archbishop of Bordeaux so that he himself could attend to moving the papacy to Avignon in 1309. The year 2006 was not quite as dazzling as the stupendous 2005, but it was a solid year and in 2025 this regal Cabernet Sauvignon/Merlot blend was still sturdy and full of delectable aromas and fruit.

As the presence of these two stars suggests, the establishment which hosted our shooting party boasts a stupendous wine list. Another room, clearly set for some evening celebration, featured a table upon which stood an open case of 2014 Lynch-Bages, one of my favorite Pauillacs, half a dozen magnums of Taittinger Champagne, and some magnums of 2003 Puligny-Montrachet “Les Perrières” from Remoissenet Père & Fils. Yum. I waited around for as long as was decorous for a dinner invitation, but none was forthcoming. Next time.

Let me take your mind off that disappointment by mentioning what is (so far) my discovery of the season in the category of rosé. I have had some excellent rosés this spring from Provence. The 2024 Domaine du Bagnol from Cassis, for example, which is midway between Marseille and Toulon (and close to Bandol, home of the famed Domaine Tempier). It is a fresh and refreshing blend of Grenache, Mourvèdre and Cinsault and it is a bargain at about $25. Then there is the 2024 La Bernarde “Les Hauts du Luc” from Côtes De Provence, a high-altitude blend of Grenache, Cinsault and Syrah. Very food-friendly and pert as a pansy. At about $20, it is a reassuring standby.

But my real find of the season is a Sicilian wine called “Rose di Adele” from the ancient (1469) winery Feudo Montoni. The wine is made from the distinctive Sicilian grape Nerello Mascalese, which the experts tell us is a cross between Sangiovese and several other Italian grapes. Most wine made from Nerello Mascalese is red – I believe we’ve sampled some along the way in these columns – but the Feudo Montoni rosé is something special. Its nose is a combination of watermelon, cotton candy and other items from the confectionery. But its taste is lucid and vernal with robust acidity and tartish fruit. It looks to be about $20-odd in stores, if you can find it. If you do, snap it up – and get one for me.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.