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This week on the Green Room, I’m talking the blues with Grammy-winning blues artist Chris Thomas King. Earlier this week, King wrote for Spectator USA a scathing criticismof the policies of the Grammys’ Blues category. King is an African American from Louisiana. He is the son of a blues musician, and grew up in his
The Favourite reviewed
The death of the last president to have served in World War Two represents the passing of an age
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Two poets named Shelley have graced the English language. One was Percy, and the other is Pete. Just as an intellectual is someone who can hear the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger, so a true lover of a three-minute pop song is someone who, hearing the words ‘Shelley’ and ‘Manchester’, thinks
His films were boring, too
What will the White House’s Thanksgiving look like in 10 years’ time?
The director Nicolas Roeg, who died on Friday aged 90, was a master of daring, dreamlike cinema — so daring and dreamlike, in fact, that the studios often didn’t know what to do with his films. Walkabout (1971) lost money on its release, but slowly became a cult classic. Bad Timing (1980) so alarmed the … Read more
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‘You’re a comical looking geezer. You’ll look funny when you’re fifty,’ Chas the gangster says to Turner the rock star in Performance, Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg’s notorious Sixties movie. ‘A heavy, evil film,’ the reviewer from It magazine wrote when Warner Brothers finally released Performance in 1970. ‘Don’t see it on acid.’ Fifty years
Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be adequately explained by greed
His kind of populism is what you get when government and media collude to silence the lawfully expressed opinions of ordinary people
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‘Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism,’ French president Emmanuel Macron said at last weekend’s Armistice Day ceremonies. ‘Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. In saying ‘our interests first, whatever happens to the others,’ you erase the most precious thing a nation can have, that which makes it live, that which causes it to be
Trump should go back to his roots with Chuck and Nancy
A Private War reviewed
Trump is so divisive that the networks couldn’t agree on who he was dividing
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This week on the Spectator USA Life & Arts podcast, I’m casting the pod with Heather Mac Donald. A scholar at the Manhattan Institute, Heather is the author of The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, a scathing and accurate critique of just about everything that’s gone
It feels like a media Democrat’s idea of a shot for the sweet spot and the middle ground
The Other Side of the Wind reviewed
The Old Man and the Gun reviewed
From our UK edition
This week on the Spectator USA Life ’n’ Arts podcast, I’m casting the pod with Matthew Hennessey. He’s an editor at the Wall Street Journal, and also the author of Zero Hour for Gen X: How the Last Adult Generation Can Save America from the Millennials (Encounter Books). It’s a fascinating read: part-political obituary of
