England

The American position on the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic should be obvious.

Henry IX is one of the most interesting monarchs Britain never had.

Not long ago I was in Boston browsing the stacks of that legendary emporium, the Brattle Book Shop, when I chanced upon Winston Spencer Churchill: Servant of Crown and Commonwealth, a collection of tributes to the parliamentarian, war leader, historian, and wit, which his longstanding English publisher Cassell brought out in 1954 to celebrate the great man’s 80th birthday. 

Last April’s wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, ubiquitously covered from Westminster Abbey by every medium from satellite to iPhone, served up a reminder that even we in this constitutional republic, where all are equal, can always be counted on to get caught up with the lives of those who are a good deal more equal than others.

Steven Amarnick reviews Gertrude Himmelfarb's The People of the Book in the Wall Street Journal:

Mark Twain once said that it was more interesting to talk to Civil War veterans about battles than to chat with poets about the moon as the versifiers had not ordinarily been to the moon.

"David Brown’s multi-faceted Palmerston,” says a blurb on the back of this volume, “in its archival mastery, scope and insight, outdistances any other.” I thought I detected a note of ambiguity in that verb “outdistances,” and I was right. Brown knows everything it’s humanly possible to know about his subject, and he has documented that knowledge in well over 2,000 endnotes.

Biography is a form of love affair, the more intense because it can never be consummated. Like lovers, biographers rifle through their subjects’ letters and diaries for evidence of the absent one’s activities and affections. They guard their subject’s reputation and become jealous of rivals. They profess to interpret, to comprehend, to promote, but they requite the years that they devote to their chosen figure of fascination by exercising the power of life or death over them, the right to immortalize or to dissect.

Last week there were four nights of rioting in London and other English towns and cities. I was shocked, but not surprised. The sense of incipient violence and a breakdown of society were high on my list of reasons why I left London and immigrated to the United States three years ago.

"Israeli Prime Minister Gets 29 Standing Ovations in Congress, Sends Message to White House"

"Journalists Say the Darndest Things!"

Jonah Goldberg: "Run, Paul Ryan, run"

The news has flown a bit under the radar here in the United States, for understandable reasons; but the results earlier this week of the Scottish parliament elections are historic. Whether this is good or bad history, of course, remains to be seen. For the first time, and much against the odds and recent opinion polls, Alex Salmond's Scottish Nationalist Party has won an absolute majority in the Edinburgh parliament--something that the Hollyrood system was designed to prevent, and which now puts the future of the United Kingdom itself in jeopardy. Let me explain.

Has England lost its nerve?

Contrary to popular belief, unions still own the Democratic Party.

Those Teabaggers are so violent! Wait... what? "Live Ammunition Found Outside Wis. Capitol."