I very much enjoyed the British series This Is Going to Hurt, which is about a doctor working in the National Health Service. It is unlike American hospital dramas in a number of ways: It’s realistic, except for occasional exaggerations (at least I hope they’re exaggerations), the actors playing the doctors actually look like doctors (as opposed to actors), it’s very funny (with the dark humor for which doctors are known), and it’s never saccharine. The other night, Shurti, the beset-upon doctor-in-training, had to deal with a patient’s outraged husband. “I pay your salary!” he shouted at her, to which she replied: “Can I have a raise then?”
All writers should see Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song if only to take heart from the revelation that the album that contains the song was rejected by Columbia Records.
I’ve been a regular reader of The Spectator since 1980 – when I would go through it back-to-front in the British Council in downtown Warsaw – so I’ve known about Boris Johnson longer than most Americans, and probably a few Brits. He wrote a column for the magazine in the ’90s and in 1999 became its editor. I was struck more by the seeming incongruities of his name than by his prose, primarily because it usually focused on politics, and I spent most of my time in the back of the book. The Spectator distinguished itself then, and still does today, by pairing its High Life column with a Low Life column, which back then was written by the inimitable Jeffrey Bernard, who once wrote: “I wish the police would block off memory lane.”
When the conservative Johnson became prime minister there came, in this country, the inevitable comparisons to Trump, which I hated. Trump had never edited a sophisticated magazine. He had never written a biography of one of his predecessors in office. He had never engaged in a public debate on the merits of the Greeks over the Romans. (Johnson’s opponent in that learned and entertaining scuffle was the Oxford classics professor Mary Beard.) Trump had never, in a television interview, recited from memory, and in Greek, long passages from The Iliad.
What the two men do share, as Johnson’s stint as prime minister has clearly shown, is a stunning unsuitability for public office. But while Trump has few talents, Johnson has many, governing just not being one of them. I am happy to see him leave 10 Downing Street, but I look forward to his next chapter. Should Trump disappear, the world would be a better place. Should Johnson disappear, it would be considerably less interesting.
Melvyn Bragg, host of a popular and long-running BBC radio program, wrote in The Spectator last week that one of his rules is to be "never knowingly relevant."
I'm just getting into "Better Call Saul" so I can't say it's one of my favorite TV shows of all time, but last night I discovered it has something in common with one of my favorite movies, "Witness." Both feature corrupt Philadelphia policemen.
And I wonder: Is police corruption so much greater in the City of Brotherly Love than in other American cities? Or is citing it in a popular entertainment simply a handy and now very tired cliché?
I have a piece – an excerpt from my memoir – in the summer issue of The American Scholar. It is my first appearance in the quarterly since the last century, and my first appearance in a quarterly in a decade. Recently my work has generally appeared in online publications, and it’s nice to see it on a page, in a physical object that was printed and pasted together, something concrete.
Also, online you’re here one day and gone the next. Same with a newspaper (I was in the Wall Street Journal twice last year). With weeklies, you have seven days of glory – especially if you’re in The New Yorker – and then you’re history. You go by the newsstand and the issue that featured your deathless prose is extinct. Quarterlies, on the other hand, hang around for three months, an entire season. And if the season is summer, with its long, lazy, seemingly endless days, your stay feels longer. It doesn’t necessarily translate into more readers – though people enjoy more free time in summer – but it does allow for the closest thing the world of periodicals has to longevity. From now until the end of August I can drop by any bookstore that carries magazines and see the one that has my words inside (as well as a vintage photo of my wife). Fish are jumpin’, and the quarterly’s there.