Rolf Harris died earlier this month - a decade after the total implosion of his celebrity, and with the announcement being held for the best part of a fortnight from his hasty shovelling into the crematorium. He was a "national treasure" on at least two continents - until one day he wasn't. And, notwithstanding two years of headlines about "Paedos at the Beeb!" re Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall, Jonathan King and others, it was still something of a shock to hear that Rolf Harris had been found guilty of twelve counts of indecent assault on young girls in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. As I said when he was charged, it would mark the demise of his small but enduring catalogue of novelty songs. "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" and "Jake The ...
It's a fine autumn day, 1823. A new school year has begun at Warwickshire's Rugby School. Among other things, that means the students have have begun to play the in-house ball game again during free time, just like every year for as long as anyone can remember. The rules never change. They will be the same this year as they were last year—which is to say, the same as they were ten, twenty, fifty years before. And given that Queen Elizabeth I's royal grocer Lawrence Sheriff founded the school in 1567, maybe two hundred plus years before. No one really knows...
Rick McGinnis on a classic war movie with Kenneth More and Dana Wynter...
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Mark answers questions from Steyn Club members around the world...
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Snerdley & Steyn on all the most exciting topics: The Durham Report!!! The Debt Ceiling showdown!!!!! Something about Hunter Biden being in trouble over his taxes!!!!!!!!! Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
In case you missed it, here's how the last seven days looked to Mark...
A remote fantastical kingdom far from Europe's chancelleries of power... An unpopular monarch on the eve of his coronation... A ruling class of plotters and would-be usurpers... ...and a gentleman adventurer on holiday. No, not Ruritania in the nineteenth century, but the United Kingdom in the twenty-first. My new book is both a sequel to and a contemporary inversion of Anthony Hope's classic of 1894, The Prisoner of Zenda...
If you enjoy Steyn's Song of the Week at SteynOnline, please note that there will be a live stage edition during the 2023 Mark Steyn Cruise - along with many other favourite features from SteynOnline and The Mark Steyn Show. More details here. It's Victoria Day weekend in Canada, so we thought it appropriate to have a song from His Majesty's northernmost realm. And does it get any more Canadian than... I like New York in June How About You? Yes, indeed. That's a sufficiently Canadian song to be in the Canadian Songwriters' Hall of Fame, for reasons Mark will get to, eventually. In this Serenade Radio edition of his Song of the Week, Steyn talks to the composer of "How About You?", Burton Lane, and explores the origins of its most memorable ...
Mark's contemporary inversion of Anthony Hope's classic The Prisoner of Zenda: The Prisoner of Windsor...
Steyn remembers Tim Ball, hounded into penury and death by the deadbeat Michael Mann...