Category Archive: LIFE
Henry ‘Chips’ Channon Diaries Volume 1
(1918 – 1938) (Edited by Simon Heffer) In the elusive search for historical truth, contemporary records such as diaries, even unreliable ones, can be valuable. Private diaries in particular, as they can break free of censorship, even self-censorship to a degree. Furthermore, insider diaries can give great insight into the mores of the times. Classic examples include Pepys, Boswell, Francis Kilvert, Anne Frank and Alan Clark. Henry “Chips” Channon (the nickname came when he roomed at Christ Church College, Oxford with a friend nicknamed “Fish”) was born in 1897 in Chicago, son of a wealthy family; served with the Red…
Continue Reading →Vale Donald
Donald Sutherland (17 July 1935 to 20 June 2024) No, they haven’t assassinated Donald Trump, yet. Rather, we honour today the passing of a Donald on the other end of the political spectrum, (if that device still applies). He was sui generis – not handsome, but suited to starring roles, not a ‘character actor’, but he enlivened many otherwise humdrum films with superb vignettes. As to the latter, think of his smiling treacherous Irishman in The Eagle Has Landed (1976), his spooky firebug in Backdraft (1991), his perfect playing as Mr. X in JFK (1991), the smiling-assassin Big-Boss in Disclosure…
Continue Reading →Eurovision 2024
Malmö in Sweden got to host dear old sparkly Eurovison after Loreena’s win in 2023. Loreena was welded into a silver cocktail glass at the end of the evening and pushed onto the stage under a fringe of shredded shower curtains where she writhed and sang a rather wan version of her 2023 winning entry. Her stringy beige bodysuit shrank in the wash so her stylists had glued some robotic bits onto it. Very Eurovision. Looks 5/5, song 1/5. Our hosts this year were normal size, not angry and only two in number. It looks like Graeme Norton said, “I’m…
Continue Reading →Traduce the Juice
O.J. Simpson I was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on 3 October 1995, the day O.J. was acquitted (because no gloves fitted). The predominantly black staff at my hotel celebrated the verdict, high-fiving each other. On the other side of the country, Los Angeles gave both a huge sigh of relief and a squawk of anger and disbelief. Absurdly, the trial had taken on racial connotations because it seems that then, as now, it is impossible to view many awful events through anything other than the prism of race (or gender, although ‘Race beats gender’). And celebrity beats everything. The best…
Continue Reading →Douglas Murray
“Uncomfortable Conversations”, Norwood Town Hall, 21 March 2024 Douglas Murray, well-known pundit and author (The Madness of Crowds, The War on the West, The Strange Death of Europe), appeared in conversation with Josh Szeps in a wide-ranging exchange of sometimes provocative, and always entertaining, common sense ideas and propositions (Hallelujah! – Ed.). TVC ground staff (in our main image flanking Mr. Murray) attending the talk in Adelaide, were disappointed to confirm that Adelaide maintains its reputation for the polite allowance of discourse. No aggro here, alas – we’d been hoping for the kind of protest and cancelling tactics attempted in…
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