againBy Cockburn

Sep 20, 2024 | thespectator.com | Lisa Haseldine |againBy Cockburn |Ben Domenech |Freddy Gray

To hear the New York Times tell it, you’d think Vice President Kamala Harris had finally started answering questions about the Biden administration’s accomplishments and her own policy positions. The Times claims Kamala “hit core campaign themes,” “spoke off the cuff” and “confronted a range of pressing issues” in a two-hour sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey. But did she really?

Sep 20, 2024 | thespectator.com | Lisa Haseldine |againBy Cockburn |Eliot Wilson |Michael Evans

“Whatever happens, Vladimir Putin must not be allowed to win the war in Ukraine.” For the first time since being released from a Russian prison in August, the politician Vladimir Kara-Murza arrived in London this week for a series of high-profile meetings to discuss Russia’s future. Kara-Murza, who holds both Russian and British citizenship, was sentenced for 25 years in Russia’s penal system last year for speaking out against the war in Ukraine.

Sep 20, 2024 | thespectator.com | againBy Cockburn |Alexander Larman |Paul Wood |Amber Duke

It’s his sworn ambition to become prime minister of the UK by 2029. But is Nigel Farage perhaps spending a little bit too much time in the States? Barely had the Reform leader finished addressing his party conference, then “ping!” An email arrived in Cockburn’s inbox touting Farage’s latest trip across the pond. The former member of European Parliament is billed as one of the headliners at the New York Young Republican Club’s gala dinner in December.

Jul 18, 2024 | thespectator.com | Bill Kauffman |Lisa Haseldine |againBy Cockburn |Laurie Graham

Can one egregiously bad scene ruin an otherwise great movie? When I go on an early 1970s jag — revisiting the golden age of American cinema — I can never bring myself to rewatch Five Easy Pieces (1970), in which Jack Nicholson plays an upper-middle-class piano prodigy turned downwardly mobile oil field worker. It’s a fine character study poisoned, for me, by the famous scene in which a petulant Nicholson berates a diner waitress who stubbornly refuses his request to add tomatoes to his omelet.