Death finds us all, but rarely is it as cruel as it was in taking Roger Scruton. He was the real deal, a genuine humanist and great philosopher, and his depths of understanding brought rare authority to his scholarship and…
What is happening in Iran right now began this time 40 years ago. On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking 66 hostages, 52 of which would be held for 444 days. It signaled the…
According to the Dickens Society of London, there have been more than 3,000 adaptations of Charles Dickens’ works, most of them for the stage, but 156 for the movies and television, not including, however, the bowdlerized, bastardized, and otherwise misbegotten…
John Simon, a prominent art, film, and books critic, died on Sunday in Valhalla, New York. He was 94. Simon was one of the most critical and widely criticized of American cultural commentators. His reviews in New York magazine, National Review, the Weekly…
Both America and The American Spectator have lost a friend and an important conservative intellectual: Peter Collier. He quietly passed away a week ago, on November 1, in a hospital in Sacramento, with little fanfare and insufficient public acknowledgment. He…
This past week we’ve seen the lengths to which the Houston Rockets and the National Basketball Association will go to kowtow to the totalitarians calling the shots in still-communist China. Alas, such craven institutional cowardice is nothing new in the…
It was 30 years ago this fall that communism collapsed in Eastern Europe. One person who would have been thrilled to witness that epic event, but who died mere weeks earlier, in July 1989, was the renowned Sidney Hook. Hook…
It’s not every day that headlines tell us that a former Canadian prime minister has tweeted, as Hurricane Dorian approaches, “I’m rooting for a direct hit on Mar a Lago.” So much for Canadian niceness. Perhaps the one-time PM is…