There was a small renaissance in science fiction movies in the early '50s, aside from the space operas and creature features, there were politically resonant, big budget titles like Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still. How and why science fiction films took themselves seriously isn't hard to understand if you just look at the headlines from the moment the film began production to after it hit theatres. Screenwriter Edmund North was working on the script for the film in the first two months of 1951, at the beginning of the first full year of the Korean War. The year began with Chinese and North Korean forces capturing Seoul, and on January 11th a report was delivered to U.S. president Truman by the National Security Resources Board ...

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Programming note: Please join me tonight for the latest episode of our seventy-second Tale for Our Time - Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Tomorrow, Saturday, I'll be back for another edition of my weekend music show, Mark Steyn on the Town at 5pm British Summer Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here. ~An official message from the French government via its mission to the United Nations: #EuropeProtects #DSAProtects #DemocracyNotAlgoracy pic.twitter.com/JvQwkGscj6 — La France à l'ONU 🇫🇷🇺🇳 (@franceonu) July 14, 2025 That's a definition of free speech we can all get behind! You have ...

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Laura Rosen Cohen rounds up the Internet...

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If you missed this week's Clubland Q&A, here's the action replay...

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Mark takes questions from Steyn Club members around the planet...

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The two existential threats that Steyn saw coming a generation ago...

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The strange and still unexplained attempted assassination of the Republican presidential candidate...

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For Bastille Day, France's fête nationale, something suitably Gallic for Mark's chanson de la semaine...

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Today is the first anniversary of the shooting of the Republican presidential candidate while on stage in Butler, Pennsylvania...

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Mark counts down a cavalcade of Non-Stop Number Ones down the decades and enjoys a sextet of Franco Sinatra, even if the French gets a bit iffy. Plus Zorba the Greek meets the washerwomen of Portugal...

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Tourism ads from Quebec and Afghanistan...

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If you're swimming in Germany, beware of predatory redhead hausfraus...

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Who owes one million dollars now?

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Today's episode was filmed live on the Mark Steyn Iberian Cruise with three of our special guests: Sammy Woodhouse, Samantha Smith and Allison Pearson...

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Welcome to Part Nine of Joseph Conrad's second very popular contribution to Tales for Our Time. Last night's episode - in which the cannibal crew got a little peckish after the white men threw the lads' rotting hippo meat overboard - prompted this reaction from Glen Flint, a First Fortnight Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club: European explorer, the other white meat. A satisfying and delicious alternative to rotten hippo. Indeed. However, in tonight's episode of Heart of Darkness, there is something more terrifying than cannibals - fog: Keep a lookout? Well, you may guess I watched the fog for the signs of lifting as a cat watches a mouse; but for anything else our eyes were of no more use to us than if we had been buried miles deep in ...

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Programming note: Tomorrow, Saturday, I'll be here with the latest episode of my Serenade Radio weekend music show, On the Town. It starts at 5pm British Summer Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here. ~Thank you for your continuing comments upon our summer audio entertainment in Tales for Our Time. Fraser, a Steyn Clubber from East Anglia, is enjoying it so far: Literature of the type read by MS in TfoT gives us a great sense of the world. Heart of Darkness is a prime example; not only those extended passages where the characters glide into the dark heart of the world (the sequence where a gun boat fires randomly ...

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~Welcome to Part Seven of our seventy-second audio entertainment in Tales for Our Time. This summer, we're enjoying Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Fran, a New Mexico Steyn Clubber, followed in Josh's footsteps of yesterday: Wow, I just binged on the same! This tale reminds me of Kipling's narrative style a bit, perhaps because of the exotic setting. Thank you, Fran. I would say Kipling's and Conrad's narrative styles differ considerably, but to a contemporary listener, who knows. You'll find eight years' worth a of our Tales archived here, in handy easy-to-access Netflix-style tile format. (Oh, and we do poetry, too.) And, if you've missed the beginning of Heart of Darkness, you can start fresh with Part One and, like Fran, have a ...

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Thank you for all your kind comments upon our seventy-second Tale for Our Time. There are two ways to enjoy our audio adventures: you can tune in nightly, twenty minutes before you lower your lamp - or you can save them up for a good old binge-listen. Josh, a Massachusetts Steyn Clubber, preferred the latter: I binged episodes 2-5 on a brisk walk through a languid early morning. Not exactly "Africa hot", as Neil Simon described it in Biloxi Blues, but steamy enough to give a tangible sense of Marlow's early steps in the Dark Continent. I also think of Kipling's "Road to Mandalay" on such mornings, when "the dawn comes up like thunder outer [Swampscott] 'crost the Bay!" What an extraordinary book, too long since read. And a fascinating ...

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Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, at 3pm North American Eastern (8pm British Summer Time), I hope to be here for another edition of our Clubland Q&A, taking questions from Mark Steyn Club listeners around the world. Hope you can swing by. ~Our summer Tale for Our Time, and the seventy-second of our Steyn Club audio adventures, is my serialisation of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's classic of 1899. In tonight's episode, our protagonist finds his fellow Europeans both absurd and disturbing: I went to work the next day, turning, so to speak, my back on that station. In that way only it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the redeeming facts of life. Still, one must look about sometimes; and then I saw this station, these men ...

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Here we go with Part Four of our brand new Tale for Our Time - Mark's summertime serialisation of Joseph Conrad's classic of 1899, Heart of Darkness...

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Welcome to Part Three of Mark's serialisation of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad...

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Welcome to Part Two of Heart of Darkness, our summer audio adventure in Tales for Our Time...

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Welcome to the seventy-second audio entertainment in our series Tales for Our Time...

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Welcome to the seventy-first audio entertainment in our series Tales for Our Time...

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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...

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