"The Death of Stalin" is the funniest new(ish) comedy film I've seen in years

We were in the mood for a mindless Hollywood action blockbuster last night - you know, one of those meaningless, fast-paced, machine-tooled...

The BBC's adaptation of "A Very English Scandal" is everything I'd hoped for - but why did Hugh Grant agree to play Thorpe?

Blake Harrison as the spectacularly useless hit-man

I read A Very English Scandal, John Preston's wonderfully entertaining blackly comedic account of the bizarre Jeremy Thorpe/Norman Scott scandal, earlier this year, and wrote about it here. It wasn't until I'd finished the book that I learned the BBC was filming a three-part series based on it, starring Ben Whishaw as Scott and Hugh Grant as Thorpe. If you've missed the first two parts, I can't recommend them highly enough - the adaptation is as funny and sinister as Preston's book (which is still worth reading for all the subplots the inevitably streamlined TV version had to leave out). The 1960s' background was well-handled, and the horrible '70s - the crap hair, the stupid clothes, the shitty cars - is beautifully evoked, and Blake Harrison as Andrew Newton, the blithering idiot hired to kill Scott,...

Now I'm really looking forward to the BBC three-part Jeremy Thorpe miniseries, "A Very English Scandal"

Three nights ago, I downloaded John Preston's enthralling (and very funny) account of Liberal politician Jeremy Thorpe's disastrous relationship with the male model Norman Scott (née Josiffe),  A Very English Scandal: Sex, Lies and a Murder Plot at the Heart of the Establishment. I finished it last night. I'm not sure why I hadn't already read it, because - apart from the Watergate hearings - the Thorpe trial in 1979 was the most exciting political legal events of the '70s. Thorpe - quite ludicrously - got off, because the Establishment basically engineered the outcome of the trial (yes, I know that sounds a bit nutty, but it did): the jury found him  and his seedy co-defendants not guilty, but just about everybody else knew that the saturnine spiv was as guilty as sin...

Last month, I saw the only existing film of my grandmother - this week, it's my father's turn!

Earlier this week, my brother sent me a YouTube link to some mute Pathé News rushes of King Olav of Norway's state visit to Scotland in 1962. When the King lays a wreath at the  Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle...

$tateside, London American and Pye International - the record labels that brought us great American music in the early '60s

I experience a warm glow at the very thought of those labels - far more than I do when I'm reminded of, say, Parlophone, EMI, Top Rank, Pye or Decca. That's because $tateside, London American and Pye International's main function was to release singles and EPs of American material which UK labels had licensed from  labels in the States. Not every record released via these subsidiaries was brilliant - but a fair proportion of the great singles released before the British Invasion - i.e between 1956 and 1963 - appeared on one of the three. Even after the British Invasion, the number of brilliant American tracks released here remained high: British beat combos were recording cover versions of formerly obscure American hits (primarily R&B) - and British companies realised they'd already licensed many of the originals. I'm going to switch to full train-spotter mode and take a look at what each label was offering the 'Oi'll geeve eet foive" generation, starting with $tateside...

When there were giants in the land - a review of Dennis C. Rasmussen's "The Infidel and the Professor"

I've just written a review of the Rasmussen book (full title: The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought) for The Salisbury Review. If you spot any howlers, please let me know:

When David Hume died in 1776, his literary executor, the economist Adam Smith, wrote an account of his death in which, after emphasising the cheerfulness with which the philosopher had faced his end, Smith described his great friend as “approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.” Smith’s eulogistic Letter to Strahan attracted widespread criticism: Dr. Johnson refused to believe that Hume had died fearlessly, while James Boswell (who had studied under Smith at Glasgow University) attacked his old tutor’s account as an example of the “poisonous productions with which this age is infested.”...

Great news! There's going to be a major TV drama series based on Henry Hemming's "M: Maxwell Knight, MI5’s Greatest Spymaster"

Knight, testing Q's latest secret camera device

When I reviewed Henry Hemming's insanely enjoyable biography of MI5 spy chief Maxwell Knight earlier this year, I wondered why there hadn't been a single TV drama or documentary about this truly extraordinary man. Little did I know that a really serious TV production company had snapped up the rights to M: Maxwell Knight, MI5’s Greatest Spymaster  before it was even published. As the company was Mammoth Screen, who are responsible for Poldark, Victoria and Witness for the Prosecution, we know that the series will have a stack of dosh lavished on it, and that it'll be snapped up by a major broadcaster - the BBC (if it can afford it) or ITV - or a major-league online video platform like Amazon or Netflix. Mark Chapman, who wrote the screenplay for Stephen Spielberg's highly enjoyable 2015 fact-based spy movie, Bridge of Spies, has been asked to adapt Hemming's book,  so the script should be top-hole. I'm genuinely excited by this news, which I only discovered after The Salisbury Review asked me to review the book for their next issue. Here's the new (hopefully much-improved) version - please holler if you spot any howlers:

The centenary of the Russian Revolution is an opportunity to restore the reputation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Harvard Commencement Address, 1978

(This is an article written for the next edition of The Salisbury Review.) When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn rose to deliver his Commencement Address at Harvard University in June, 1978, he was arguably the world’s leading cultural figure: a globe-bestriding literary giant in the tradition of Tolstoy; an implacable, grim-faced Old Testament prophet in the mould of Jeremiah; a heroic, seemingly indestructible truth-teller who survived imprisonment, exile and cancer to bear witness to the horrors that ensue whenever Communism is put into practice.

That's it - we're doomed!

Presumably it went something like this...

I might have to revise my opinion of Gamal Abdel Nasser...

That was 1958.  Here - in an image which I find truly poignant - are three young women snapped in Kabul in the 1970s:

What Western academics, Jeremy Corbyn and Islamic fanatics agree on

Believe it or not, this list wasn't compiled by some bitter old right-winger like me...

"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." These vintage adverts would suggest L.P. Hartley was correct...

No, it's not a spoof. And neither is the next one, or (as far as I know) any of the adverts below:

Murderous communist tyrant dies - the Left bursts into tears and the mass media get all nuanced...

Er... no, it doesn't, Nick. It really doesn't. As comedian Lee Hurst pointed out:

The second episode of the Netflix series "The Crown" is probably the finest hour of TV drama I've ever seen

Television drama has rarely left me emotionally drained - but "Hyde Park Corner", the second episode of the new 10-part series, The Crown, was overwhelming...

I'm a culturist - I believe some cultures are superior to others. So does the American writer and commentator Andrew Klavan.

I recently read Andrew Klavan's latest book, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.  As I try not to "do God" on this site (well, not overdo Him, anyway), I won't deal with the overtly religious parts of the book - fascinating though I found them, as they're full of parallels to and echoes of my own experience. I will, however, highlight his thoughts on culturism (i.e. the belief in the superiority of one's own cultural tradition to others) because they strike me as enormously sensible, wise and well-expressed - and extraordinarily important, given the success of the cultural and moral relativists who run so much of our national life in emptying our existence of meaning:

The BBC is running a Black and British season? Why did nobody mention this???

October was Black History Month. This month, the BBC is running a Black & British season. Here's Jay Davidson, Assistant Commissioner, BBC Two and BBC Four, explaining what it's all about:

The takeover of academia by cultural Marxists - Niall Ferguson's "Decline and Fall of History" is funny, depressing and utterly magnificent

A few years ago...

Mary Seacole deserves her London statue for being a pioneering black female entrepreneur rather than for being a lovely, warm-hearted black pseudo-nurse

I only became aware of the cult of the black Crimean War "nurse" Mary Seacole when some right-wing scribbler ranted about her on the Telegraph website six or seven years ago. Apparently schoolchildren were being taught that this mixed-race Jamaican immigrant was at least as significant in terms of her contribution to nursing British soldiers as that boring old white woman Florence Nightingale, who had basically stolen Nurse Seacole's thunder due to (what else) - racism! I did a trawl online and found that this was indeed the multiculti narrative being peddled for all it was worth by PC "diversity" enthusiasts. Here, for example, is what the BBC was telling children:

Victorian London had Germans up the wazoo - good 'uns and bad 'uns: doctors, sugar bakers, pimps and murderers

Walter Pater

The magnificently moustachioed chap on the right is Walter Pater, who was (among other things), a Victorian essayist, novelist, art critic and Oxford don. I recently read his most famous work, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, published in 1873, and I can understand why its determined Godlessness and the whiff of amorality and hedonism upset conservatives at the time (one critic dismissed Pater's philosophy as "rococo epicurianism", and George Eliot described his work as "poisonous"), and why his attitude to art and life made him a friend of - and a huge influence on - the Aesthetic/Decadent/Art for Art's Sake movement(s) in late Victorian Britain. The confirmed bachelor who talked of success in life as requiring that one "burn always with this hard, gem-like flame", and who believed that "all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music" was particularly close to Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons. Anyway, that's all irrelevant: my purpose in mentioning Pater is that, looking into his background (i.e. looking him up on Wikipedia) I discovered that his father was a German physician who tended the East End poor - Pater's early years were spent in Stepney. Well, so what?

Did the Scots beat the English at Bannockburn? Or was it a case of Normans beating Normans?

Every country, race, religion and individual views the world through a multi-faceted and often self-contradictory prism of myth and legend (and if that doesn't get me into Pseud's Corner, nothing ever will). Not all myths and legends are untrue, of course, and not all myths and legends are harmful to those whose view of reality is coloured by them - but many are both false and harmful.  I suspect many Europhiles of the Islington tendency would cite everything from Londoners battling heroically through the Blitz to the view of the British Empire as an almost unalloyed good which brought law and trade to those lucky enough to be colonised as partially responsible for British voters' "disastrous" decision to "leave Europe". In the US, left-wing historians have spent decades sneering at the myths which have made generations of Americans proud of their country.