The impotence of the porn industry

Just north of the Strand, behind where the Australian High Commission now stands, there used to be what the press called “a fetid, miserable lane”. One of 19th-century London’s more disreputable districts, it housed the poor, the criminal, the prostitute …

Will Hollywood strike back?

In the Fifties, television destroyed radio, many of whose stars were themselves survivors of the death of vaudeville, and persisted through radio and into film: The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields. And many of the first movie stars had come first …

Stephen King’s boomer propaganda

Of all the plagues on contemporary literary culture, the absolute worst is the notion that depiction equals endorsement: that every protagonist in every book is just a thinly-veiled authorial insert; that evil characters doing evil things reflect the morals of …