Many observers have been baffled by the performance of the Metropolitan Police during London’s recent riots, with officers seeming to stand by as homes were attacked and businesses destroyed. This was partly poor tactics, but it was also a function of a deeper malaise – a model of passive policing that has failed and must now [Read more…]
Time to Abandon Britain's CCTV Policing (Financial Times Aug.10, 2011)
Policing/Urban Policy
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Why They Rioted in London (Commentary October 2011)
Latest Articles, Policing/Urban Policy
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The riots that erupted in London on August 6 finally petered out after four days. By then thousands of police officers had been drafted from other parts of the United Kingdom to stand guard on the streets of London and the city’s own Metropolitan Police had finally taken a more active tack against the looting, including [Read more…]
London Aflame (NR August 29, 2011)
Latest Articles, Policing/Urban Policy
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What happens when you let teenagers run your country. YESTERDAY, August 8, I was watching live looting footage— some of it from districts near mine or where friends were hunkered down behind locked doors— with appalled fascination, when the 1992 L.A. riots came to mind. It was not be- cause here in London we have had [Read more…]
Big Bad Brits, And Other Movie Casting Myths (NR April 1998)
Culture/Manners, Film/History
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Media people are different, if not from you or me, then from most Americans. They tend to be upper middle class and, if they are in positions of influence, to be Baby Boomers, i.e., between the ages of 35 and 55. Their politics and their values are influenced more by their generational experience than by anything [Read more…]
Paul Johnson's "Winston Churchill, Distilled" (Wall Street Journal Dec. 11 2009)
Interviews/Profiles
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Paul Johnson is the most celebrated and best-loved British historian in America, especially by readers of a conservative bent. Astonishingly prolific, he has over three decades produced a series of serious best sellers, all of which present a refreshingly revisionist take on their subjects. Most controversial of all, perhaps, was his defense of Richard Nixon in [Read more…]
Delhi Anew (Verve Magazine August 2010)
South Asia
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Delhi’s makeover from bureaucratic backwater to dazzling metropolis has occurred in the blink of an eye. Jonathan Foreman looks at the country’s capital city with a fresh perspective No place I know has changed as much or as bewilderingly quickly as Delhi. It is not just that it looks and feels so different today than it [Read more…]
Films and film criticism seem to bring out the prejudices of British journalists, in particular a low-level animus against things American. You can see this in the often over the top carping about Hollywood bad guys with British accents (a phenomenon I wrote about here) and simultaneous failure notice the way that Brit actors who can [Read more…]
Returning to Baghdad, where he was embedded in 2003, the author finds the “Hellraisers” of the Third Infantry facing the challenge of training Iraq’s new army I first saw Baghdad on April 8, 2003, two days before the city fell, while embedded with the army’s Third Infantry Division. What is now the Green Zone was recently [Read more…]
Talk of the Town – The Pictures – With the Islanders away, Bollywood invades the Nassau Coliseum On a normal Saturday night, the security detail at Nassau Coliseum has the arduous task of keeping thousands of heavymetal enthusiasts in line. Or the famously aggressive fans of the New York Islanders. But at the recent performance of [Read more…]
A Clownish Killer (FrumForum Oct 21, 2011)
It is perhaps a shame that no one will have a chance to interrogate Gaddafi and find out the details of his regime’s involvement in crimes like the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103, the equally appalling but less cited bringing down of UTA Flight 772 in 1989, the bombing of the Berlin discothèque that led [Read more…]