The other day a writer I greatly esteem, lauding a new biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, wrote a sentence that left me near apoplexy: that “of Roosevelt’s greatness there can be no question.� In the first place, I think it’s always risky to say there is no room for a second opinion on matters where... Read More

Last week a friend dropped by with a big gift: the opulent new Modern Library edition of the works of Shakespeare, more than 2,000 pages long, produced in conjunction with the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose excellent Coriolanus my friend, his father, and I had just seen at the Kennedy Center two weeks earlier. As if... Read More

Am I the only one who still remembers Manuel Noriega? He’s one of the reasons we have a Department of Defense. When he was running Panama, the first President George Bush (am I the only one who still remembers him too?) decided he was such a threat, like Hitler (of course you remember him!), that... Read More

Two years ago, after foot surgery, I started walking with a cane. The ankle has healed, but I’ve kept the cane. I like it. It helps my balance, it’s funny, and it strengthens my faith. In this allegedly Darwinian world, where life is a ruthless competition for survival, my cane is magic. It causes young... Read More

How the mighty are fallen! Or falling, anyway. Tony Blair is finished. George W. Bush is being deserted by the party he has wrecked, the submerging Republican majority. And Rudy Giuliani, only recently the front-runner for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, looks like a goner. Thanks to Pope Benedict, he probably has no hope of... Read More

The most beautiful religious movie I’ve ever seen is the 1947 French film Monsieur Vincent, which dramatizes the later life of St. Vincent de Paul, best known for his organizational genius in ministering to the poor. It ends with a wise insight. The dying priest, played by the great Pierre Fresnay, tells a young nun... Read More

Thirty years ago, Laurence Olivier said a startling thing. He’d just seen the musical Sugar Babies, starring Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller, and he pronounced Rooney “my favorite actor.� I thought Olivier was joking, or maybe sarcastically putting down his rivals in the classical theater. I took Rooney for a minor Hollywood has-been, more notable... Read More

Guess what this is about: Ruth Marcus, a pundit for the Washington Post, uses the abstract word procedure eleven times in a single column. She doesn’t use the word kill even once! If you guessed that she is writing about abortion, you are correct. More specifically, she’s defending gruesome late-term abortions against a recent ruling... Read More

Even before they’d finished mopping up the blood at Virginia Tech, the Washington Post had some editorial counsel for Virginia: Adopt tougher gun control laws. Thanks for the free advice, guys! If we citizens of Jefferson’s state adopt laws as strict as Washington’s, maybe we can get our murder rate down — possibly as low... Read More

Nothing against Jackie Robinson, a great and brave ballplayer, and the anniversary of his arrival is giving all us white folks a delicious opportunity to feel virtuously bad about ourselves; but maybe it’s time for a little historical perspective. The Imus uproar — all over a single dumb, insulting wisecrack — points up a cultural... Read More

All the experts agree: Global warming is really happening, and man is to blame. Only more powerful government (and less personal freedom) can save us. Slam dunk. Observe that no crisis ever warrants less government and more freedom. So why don’t I believe in global warming? Because I get just a wee bit suspicious when... Read More

So Barack Obama has Big Momma on the canvas. When it comes to fundraising, he has essentially beaten La Hillary at her own game, nearly matching her $26 million but with far more donors. And since we’re all a wee bit tired of her, he’s the sentimental favorite. It’s the young underdog versus the aging... Read More

It’s nearly Easter, and the atheists, God bless them, are writing bestselling books to prove the good Lord’s nonexistence. Truly, they have their reward. One of the most famous of them, a British professor named Richard Dawkins, says atheists are generally smarter than Christians. I wouldn’t doubt it. After all, St. Paul says God has... Read More

Sandy. That would be Koufax. I’ve written about him before. Outstanding left-hander. For five magical years, with the Los Angeles Dodgers, he was the best. Not quite perfect, maybe, except the night of September 9, 1965, against the Chicago Cubs. That night the losing pitcher, Bob Hendley, was nearly perfect too, giving up only one... Read More

My enemies, who call themselves “the United States Government,� appear formidable at first glance. They have a global empire (democracy, you know), the power to make arbitrary laws, a vast prison system, the Internal Revenue Service (service? Well, no doubt it’s serving someone), the allegiance of the American people, plus a few thousand nuclear weapons,... Read More

Today I’ll be discussing what is called “sex,� drawing on my own personal experience, so I hope the reader will put up with some frank language. Chiefly I’ve learned that a woman doesn’t have to be “sexy.� She just has to be female. It started back in Michigan with my first girlfriend, Sandy, when I... Read More

We seldom know what our adversaries are doing behind our backs until it’s too late, but sometimes, when we are fortunate, they expose themselves without realizing it. Writing in the Washington Post, Stanley Wells, doyen of Shakespeare scholars, asserts that there is “overwhelming evidence� that “William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays and poems for... Read More

A little tired of politics? Of course you are. We all are. Well, I have a treat for you: Shakespeare’s least-known great play, Coriolanus, the story of a brave and honest (though not always amiable) man who hates politics with all his heart. It’s a tragedy fraught with magnetic eloquence and unexpected lessons for our... Read More

It was around this time of year over two millennia ago — in Lent, just before St. Patrick’s Day — that Julius Caesar was struck down. Of course Rome was not yet a Catholic city, let alone Irish, but it had a powerful criminal element, its senate. Thanks to Shakespeare, the official version of the... Read More

As a boy growing up in Michigan half a century ago, thousands of miles from London during the golden age of Shakespearean acting, I wished I could have seen Laurence Olivier on the stage as Macbeth, or Paul Scofield as Hamlet, or Richard Burton as Coriolanus, or Alec Guinness as Lear’s Fool. England was crawling... Read More

Despite Seymour Hersh’s latest lurid allegations in The New Yorker, I don’t think the Bush administration really wants to nuke Iran. Thinking outside the box, it has merely realized that an obvious solution to global warming is nuclear winter. And if Iran strikes back, so much the better, in the long run. So this may... Read More

In 1598, Francis Meres praised “mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare.� He added, “The Muses would speak with Shakespeare’s fine-filed phrase, if they would speak English.� To celebrate my birthday this week, I’ve gathered a bouquet of Shakespeare’s short phrases, hoping especially that young readers will fall in love with his astonishing inspiration, as I once did.... Read More

As I write, Anna Nicole’s remarkable corpse is still in a Florida morgue and closure appears to be a long way off. The cremation compromise is not an option. This is a case which, as the judge himself has suggested, even Solomon couldn’t resolve. Nobody even thinks of putting Anna Nicole behind us. Fox News... Read More

After long study, I’ve concluded that our leaders are not necessarily trying to be funny. But you are entitled to draw your own conclusions. All I really know is what I see on the cable news channels. This was my only contact with the outside world for several days recently, when my furnace was dead... Read More

After accusing various popes, saints, politicians, celebrities, and even my humble self of anti-Semitism over the years, the columnist Richard Cohen is shocked to find that he has been accused of anti-Semitism himself. I’m surprised that he is shocked. He has written critically of the state of Israel, and he’s now one of a number... Read More