John Mortimer 1923-2009

He was not a very nice man; but he was a very brilliant one.  Creator of Rumpole; author; playwright; adapter of classics; not to mention one of the greatest lawyers of his generation. The BBC supplies a sampling of his bon mots.  And the Daily Telegraph’s drama...

Little Things Mean A Lot

Noted by Tom Shales in his critique of President Bush’s farewell address: Although noting Bush has five more days in office before Obama is sworn in, CBS News anchor Katie Couric even prematurely deprived Bush of the traditional introduction afforded...

Be Seeing You: Patrick McGoohan 1928-2009

Actor Patrick McGoohan died in Los Angeles on Tuesday after a brief illness; he was 80. Beginning in the summer of 1968, the seventeen episodes of The Prisoner —the British spy-science fiction series he helped to create and starred in— were broadcast on...

RN Right Both From And About The Start

You can almost feel the frisson that must have gone through what’s left of the newsroom at the Los Angeles Times when an anomaly in a fifty year old story seemed to hold out the possibility that RN was lying in the very first line of his 1978 memoirs where he...

The Sun Sets On Another Part Of The British Empire

As reported in today’s (London) Times: The classic British bulldog, a symbol of defiance and pugnacity, is to disappear. A shake-up of breeding standards by the Kennel Club has signalled the end of the dog’s Churchillian jowl. Instead, the dog will have a...