Christopher Sandford reports on the coronation of King Charles III, from Buckingham Palace.
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Liz Truss Takes Britain’s Helm Amid Stormy Seas
Britain's new Prime Minister Liz Truss, of the Conservative Party, has her work cut out for her in a country poised to undergo a difficult winter.
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Seattle’s Summer of Hate
“We’ve got four blocks in Seattle that you just saw pictures of that is more like a block party atmosphere. It’s not an armed takeover… We could have the Summer of Love.” —Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan These sanguine and rather evocative words were uttered on CNN the other evening by Seattle’s mayor. She was speaking...
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Is Seattle Dying?
Not long ago, I found myself sitting one sunny Friday afternoon in the Unity Museum in Seattle, notebook in hand, as a group of fresh-faced college undergraduates participated in a debate over whether or not their city is dying. The general conclusion of the affair and the grim message of the students was that it...
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Lost and Found in America
One Saturday night last summer I found myself sitting on a warm, grassy knoll outside Missoula, Montana, watching a blood-red sun set behind a cup in the hills with the snow-fringed Bitterroot Mountains beyond, while in the foreground an elfin, 70-year-old man dressed entirely in black leather, accompanied by an energetically hair-swinging band, blasted out...
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Ask Jeeves
Some of the best-loved characters in English literature are observed only dimly through the eyes of an unreliable first-person narrator; like fish seen through the glass of a tank, they swim toward us, momentarily dazzling in their colors, before receding again into the murk. Such is surely the case with P.G. Wodehouse’s immortal creation Reginald...
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American Artisan
Whenever Robert Valade embarked on a commissioned piece, or simply took his hammer and chisel to cut an exquisitely fashioned design into a gift for a friend, he first bowed his large head and prayed to God to help him finish the job right. It was a simple ritual Robert performed some 14,000 times during...
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Gone to Pot
From the December 2016 issue of Chronicles. It is seven o’clock on a peaceful late-summer evening here in suburban Seattle, and I’m sitting in my back garden smoking marijuana. Passively smoking, I should add, lest I shock any reader by this sorry lapse, but smoking nonetheless. This time of year, my property is especially fragrant...
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To See and to Speak
From the June 2012 issue of Chronicles. Most retrospectives take the Swinging Sixties, and more particularly Swinging London, on their own terms. “Society was shaken to its foundations!” a 2011 BBC documentary on the subject shouted. “All the rules came off, all the brakes came off . . . the floodgates were unlocked. . ....
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Khrushchev and Me
Around 50 years ago Basil D’Oliveira, a South African-born, olive-skinned professional cricketer who emigrated to England and qualified to play for his adopted home’s national team, was as controversial a sportsman in his way as Muhammad Ali, or Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the Black Power-saluting American athletes at the 1968 Olympics, or even the...
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The Cottingley Fairies, and Fatima
Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote that the idea of an acceptable form of public entertainment underwent a rude shock in the years around World War I. By then in his mid-50’s, he had abandoned any pretense of sympathy for modern culture. In particular, Conan Doyle shrank from the more proscriptive plays of Henrik Ibsen, as...
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True Grit
A remark one often hears from the current crop of film critics is that John Wayne might indeed merit the iconographic status conferred on him by tens of millions of ordinary cinemagoers around the world, were it not for the troubling matter of his alleged evasion of military service during World War II—an issue, it...
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Sicced on Citizens
Nowadays, the federal government is the closest thing many Americans have to a religion, with those employed by it regarding themselves as a priesthood. Blind faith, if not dependency, tends to take over from observation. But there are other likenesses: sanctimonious cardinals and government functionaries, grandiose department-cathedrals that suck up money from believer and infidel...
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The Satan Club
At last, the Tacoma Public Schools’ board has recognized the obvious educational potential of the Prince of Darkness. For years, this hopelessly hidebound and reactionary institution has restricted itself to providing what it calls “a welcoming, nurturing environment [to] . . . provide the knowledge and skills for students to become respectful, responsible life-long learners...
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Sounds of the Sixties
To address the main question first: Yes, they really can. That’s the definitive answer to America’s burning cultural debate of the 1960’s about whether or not the Monkees could actually play their musical instruments. Perhaps you remember the general contours of the arguments pro and con: on the one hand, that the Monkees were four...
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Our Progressive Sexual Apartheid
I recently attended a rock concert where the headline act—an artful blend of political correctness and antic comedy dressed in a leopard-skin overcoat under a silver wig—lectured us at some length on the need to respect women. His remarks were repeated at intervals throughout the performance, and at one point were illustrated by images of...
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Gone to Pot
It is seven o’clock on a peaceful late-summer evening here in suburban Seattle, and I’m sitting in my back garden smoking marijuana. Passively smoking, I should add, lest I shock any reader by this sorry lapse, but smoking nonetheless. This time of year, my property is especially fragrant with the acrid smell of pot, and...
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Pomp and Circumstance
The red-faced, middle-aged man with the bullhorn standing in London’s Oxford Street cut straight to the chase. “If,” he shouted, “Oliver Cromwell had been here today and had seen us all bowing and scraping to this ridiculous old woman and her bloody kids, he would have started another civil war . . . Wake up!”...
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The Sentinel
“Don’t mention the war,” my grandfather told me a few minutes before our guest, an old friend from the Business Administration faculty at the nearby university, joined us for lunch. This was in Tacoma, Washington, in the summer of 1975, and I was visiting from England, on vacation from college. In that particular summer, it...
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Sizing Up the Feline Uproar
We all have our perspectives. In London recently, I found that many of the locals had stayed up until the early hours of a wet Monday morning to watch Super Bowl 50 on television, and judging from the T-shirts being paraded around town there seems to be a particular groundswell of support among British youth...
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EMP (“Are You Experienced?”)
Is rock music truly an art? This question has never met with a straightforward answer, either by the musicians themselves or the many who venerate them, and it hangs over the massive bulk of the Experience Music Project and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame here in Seattle. The EMP is a 140,000-square-foot...
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The Future of Publishing
In 2004, a middle-aged English businessman named George Courtauld decided to put together a slim, illustrated album for his three young sons. It was called The Pocket Book of Patriotism. The original idea had come to him on a crowded train home from work to his house in the countryside east of London on Christmas...
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Pax in Our Times
In 1970’s London, things were a bit more rudimentary than they are today: You considered yourself lucky to get through 24 hours without losing your electricity thanks to the latest “industrial action” (strike, to you and me), the trains were invariably late, and my memory is that most people didn’t exactly overdo it when it...
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Britain Decides
There’s something admirably old-fashioned about a British general election. Instead of the two years of incessant blather we get over here (“Just 11 weeks until the first GOP debate!” I heard recently on FOX News), the whole thing is over inside a month. The odds are good that nobody will call you in that period...
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Trashed
This is a tale of two cultures. The first is that of the 1960’s Britain where I grew up. By and large, the taxpaying householder was still the unchallenged master of his domain. The phrase “An Englishman’s home is his castle” hadn’t yet been tainted by satire or irony, nor by any hint of spurious...
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Detroit: The Calm After the Storm
The message on the downtown wall was brief, and the writer got straight to the point. “Whitey,” it read, “Get out! Your [sic] stupid f–ken [sic] prejudice [sic]! Hit Eight Mile Road!” After a couple of crude but potent illustrative doodles, it was signed, “Mad and Dangerous.” If you were looking for the authentic voice...
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Brian Williams’ Job
You know within a few moments of meeting him whether a “celebrity” is going to be a regular guy. It’s not just the winning smile, or his willingness to pose for endless selfies; it is whether or not he’s matured around a recognizable value system, the presence or otherwise of a due sense of modesty...
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Delivering the Goods
My local post office in suburban Seattle seems to be rigged to discourage customers these days. When you ask for the slightest bit of “consumer assistance”—as their cheerful mission statement on the wall promises they’re only too happy to provide—they seem to get ferociously cross. I was once read the riot act by a young...
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It’s a Drag
That characteristic feature of our age, the impressively feckless adolescent indulged by a craven and cynical media, reared its head this past October 15 in the rural community of Randle, Washington. For reasons known only to themselves, the authorities at the 188-student White Pass High School invited their charges to attend class that particular morning...
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A Very American Hotel
Forty years is a long enough stretch, but it seems far less than half a lifetime ago when, as a surly British teenager, I found myself clutching an all-day pass to the 1974 World’s Fair in Spokane, Washington. I was there on my summer vacation from Cambridge, and it seemed to me an almost satirically...
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Middle-Class Pretensions
When I was growing up in England 50 years ago, the newspapers still periodically caused a certain amount of mirth by “outing” a national figure as not some impeccably Eton-reared patrician, as his public image seemed to imply, but a horny-handed son of the soil who had gone to the local state school and taken...
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That Special Relationship
John Kennedy and Harold Macmillan were the odd couple of the Special Relationship. Conjuring a picture of them from the cuttings files and obituaries, they seem almost comically mismatched. For much of the three years that they overlapped in their respective offices, the grouse-shooting British premier appeared ludicrously archaic next to a President who confidently...
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My Big Brother
Not long ago, while reading A.J.P. Taylor’s impressively turgid English History: 1914-1945, I found, suspended in the tepid depths of all the fussily annotated tables and statistics, a sentence that all but knocked me out of my chair. It read, “Until August 1914, a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could cheerfully grow old and hardly notice the...
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Mick Jagger at 70
“Ooh ooh baby, I got a message for you,” Sir Mick Jagger croons, among other endearments, on the most recent Rolling Stones single, the aptly titled “One More Shot.” The creative muse may have gone south for Jagger and the boys sometime during the first Nixon administration, but the marketing machinery keeps these specimens of...
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Never See His Kind Again
My father, Sefton Sandford, died last November 11, which somehow appropriately was Veterans Day. He was 87. Any child’s judgment is apt to be subjective on these occasions, but I remain stubbornly of the opinion that he was a great man, and certainly one who answered Wordsworth’s question, “Who is the happy warrior? Who is...
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Frost/Nixon
David Frost is a schizophrenic. His creative personality bestrides the Atlantic ocean. When he’s at home in England, Sir David, as he’s known, fronts daytime-television panels and gives splendid summer parties at the country home he shares with his wife, Lady Carina Fitzalan-Howard. For many years, he also hosted a Sunday-morning interview hour in which,...
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High Times for Democracy
When George McGovern died, aged 90, two weeks before the last general election, the obituaries rightly praised his long and fitfully distinguished record as a U.S. representative and senator, his years of military service, his plucky presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, and his principled opposition to the Vietnam War, among other such causes. Unlike the...
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Piltdown Man
Virginia Woolf once wrote that human nature suddenly changed in the year 1912. Such things tend to be at the whim of later generations of critics, but there’s no doubt that the idea of an acceptable form of public entertainment underwent a rude shock in the years just before the outbreak of World War I. ...
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Julian Maclaren-Ross
Probably the first thing that ought to be said about the quintessentially flamboyant, hard-drinking, and doomed British author Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64) is that he could really write. Anyone familiar with the genre will know that there’s a long if not always proud tradition of debauched-looking men in black capes loitering around London pubs, a cigarette...
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The Soldier’s Soldier
At 9:40 p.m. on Friday, October 23, 1942, the night sky on the Egyptian coast west of Alexandria was suddenly lit by three red flares, followed, a moment later, by the unearthly screech of 882 phosphorus-shell launchers and other heavy-artillery pieces coming to life. The guns lined up virtually wheel to wheel, one every seven...
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Boyhood and Single-Sex Education
In Britain, the late 1940’s and early 50’s were probably the hardest years of the 20th century. For millions of people, the postwar decade was one of icy nights in gaslit rooms, interminable queues, and meals composed of whale fat and tinned beef—the comically vile ingredients of a serious sacrifice that particular generation is unlikely...
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A Mayor for London
Welcome to Britain. The day I arrived, just as London’s mayor officially declared the city open for the Olympic Games, there were two-hour lines to pass through border controls at Heathrow, and that was just for us lucky British passport holders. Earlier that morning, police had been forced to intervene to deal with unrest after...
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To See and to Speak
Most retrospectives take the Swinging Sixties, and more particularly Swinging London, on their own terms. “Society was shaken to its foundations!” a 2011 BBC documentary on the subject shouted. “All the rules came off, all the brakes came off . . . the floodgates were unlocked. . . . A youthquake hit Britain,” and so...
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Get Back
For some time now, I’ve had it in mind to write a book called Everything You Know Is Wrong. Among other areas, it would visit various modern celebrities whose fame, it could be said, is more a function of lurid self-projection, and the unrelenting embrace of the media, than of any innate creative ability on...
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My IRS Hell
There are better ways to start the week than to walk down to the mailbox on a Monday morning and find a letter bearing the return address “Internal Revenue Service—Criminal Investigation Division.” The whole ghastly business had its origins in a desire to do the right thing by Uncle Sam. One day in August 2009,...
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Scott of the Antarctic
Very long ago, when I was at boarding school in England in the 1960’s, we had a Sunday-morning ritual following chapel. Mr. Gervis, our remote and forbidding headmaster, assembled everyone in the big hall and read to us from an improving book. Over the years, I can remember generous helpings of everything from The Pilgrim’s...
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Conan Doyle
On the evening of September 7, 1919, 60-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle sat down in a darkened room in Portsmouth, England, to speak with his son Kingsley, who had died in the Spanish-influenza epidemic ten months earlier. “We had strong phenomena from the start,” Conan Doyle later wrote to his friend and fellow occultist Oliver Lodge:...
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Ron Sims
People call me up and say they want to beat me to a pulp. I am, they tell me, a lowlife muckraker, and obviously a racist to boot. Some of my closest friends express doubts about my sanity. An apparently well-subscribed website appears to be devoted to my downfall and calls for my books to...
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That Wedding
“She’s such an inspiration. She’s class.” That’s how 17-year-old Bianca, in her gold-lamé miniskirt, summed up Kate Middleton, 90 minutes before the British royal wedding. Like many others, Bianca was positioned alongside the Mall in central London, but unlike most she had the advantage of a view. She was being carried on the shoulders of...
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Growing Up Too Fast
In 2008, a young friend from the Czech Republic spent six months in the United States, in part to help me research a book on Roman Polanski and the mores of Hollywood in general. At first she was highly impressed by what she found there; she thought she had encountered a higher civilization. No one...