Is the Sun Setting on the United Kingdom? The Abolition of Britain – From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana, by Peter Hitchens A few years ago, I was hiking up to an observatory in Georgetown on the Malaysian island of Penang. On the steep, winding road to the top, I fell into conversation with a well-dressed [Read more…]
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The Battle of Britain (Weekly Standard March 12, 2001)
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Scorsese's "Gangs of New York" Distorts History (Daily Telegraph 15 Jan 2003)
Film/History, Old Articles/Archive
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Scorsese’s film portrays racist mass murderers as victims Martin Scorsese is rightly the most lauded living American film-maker – a beacon of integrity as well as a brilliant talent. But his bloody, visually gorgeous new epic, Gangs of New York, set in Civil War-era Manhattan, distorts history at least as egregiously as The Patriot, Braveheart or [Read more…]
"Gladiator" Review (NYPost May 5, 2000)
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Gladiator Kicks Butt MORE than just a welcome revival of the toga movie – a genre dead for more than 30 years, if you don’t count Bob Guccione’s gamy “Caligula” – “Gladiator” is an exhilarating, sweeping epic that begs to be seen on the largest possible screen. At times it’s surprisingly languorous for a modern actioner. [Read more…]
Signing OFF on Human Rights (Standpoint, June 2010)
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Oslo Dispatch There are not many occasions in life when you feel honoured to be in the same room as someone. However, it happened to me several times during the three days of the Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF). The first was when Mukhtar Mai arrived. She is the Pakistani woman whose gang rape was ordered by [Read more…]
Blandinavia! (Daily Mail September 2005)
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Oslo Another day in paradise but no one is smiling. Winter, with its long hours of darkness, has not yet come to Norway. The sun is still shining on its breathtaking landscapes and stunning people. But a persistent gloominess pervades – a sense of discontent that prompts one to wonder just what it is that people [Read more…]
Roger Ebert, R.I.P. (NRO April 5, 2013)
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I was shocked to hear last night of Roger Ebert’s death. This was partly because only yesterday I read a blog post, written by him on Tuesday, in which he announced that he was about to take a “leave of presence” from his fearsome schedule of film reviews (more than 200 in 2012) but was relaunching his [Read more…]
'Black Hawk Down', Two Decades Later (NRO Oct. 5, 2013)
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How an extraordinary feat of arms was turned into a political catastrophe. October 3rd and 4th marked the 20th anniversary of the “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia, also known as the First Battle of Mogadishu. The BBC ran a video report about it on Thursday entitled “US Black Hawk Down military disaster revisited.” It is worth watching [Read more…]
Defeat in the "Information Battle Space" (National Review May 17, 2007)
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The Western media, wittingly or not, are aiding our enemies Islamabad — The week I was in Afghanistan this winter, two big stories hit the international press. The first involved the publication of photographs of German NATO troops apparently “desecrating” the remains of dead Afghans. The second was about the accidental killing of up to two hundred [Read more…]
When the Fix is In (National Review, Sept 10, 2007)
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Fixers, interpreters, and reporting from Iraq A British colleague of mine was sent by his newspaper to Iraq in 2005, just before the July 7 bombings in London. After that attack, his editor asked him to canvass “ordinary Iraqis” for their reaction. The resulting article reported that all but one of the twelve Baghdadis my [Read more…]