Author Archive
November 11, 2024Quincy Jones, who died on November 3 aged 91, was the last major musician whose working life spanned the arc of 20th-century American music. Jones was born in 1933, only six years...
October 28, 2024I gave up reading American literary fiction when its authors gave up writing it. The novel was born with its subject, the bourgeois individual. When it became uncool to be bourgeois...
August 12, 2024LONDON—I have seen rock ‘n’ roll’s past, and its name is still Bruce Springsteen. I have seen Springsteen half a dozen times over five decades, indoors and...
May 21, 2024Anthony Burgess wrote 2,000 words a day. Finished copy, mind you, not drafts. This would have put him in the middleweight division of the 19th century, when heavy hitters like...
April 8, 2024Miles Davis's 1959 album Kind of Blue is the best-selling instrumental jazz album of all time. As the music-buying public is rightly suspicious of jazz, that...
March 18, 2024The Mafia is an American institution. No wonder it's been in decline since the 1970s. Unlike other American institutions such as the DMV and the TSA, the MOB is esteemed by many of...
March 8, 2024Great cities are full of poor people, for great cities manufacture poverty along with wealth. Victorian England invented a new, industrial poverty. Its workshop was Manchester, the...
January 8, 2024The South of France is beautiful if you don't look at it. Keep your back to the coast, and the Mediterranean sea and sky look much the same as they did to the ancient Greeks who...
