Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

August 21, 2026August 22, 2026

The Ghost, the Pope, and Peter O’Toole

Five days after he opened the National Theatre of Great Britain, Peter O’Toole sat in a BBC studio talking about ghosts. The date was October 27, 1963. His stage that week was the Old Vic, where the National had launched itself on October 22 with an uncut Hamlet, four and a half hours of it, directed by Laurence Olivier and starring O’Toole, thirty-one years old and world famous off the back of Lawrence of Arabia. On television he had company worth the license fee: Huw Wheldon hosting the late-night arts program Monitor, Orson Welles holding forth across the table, and the veteran Ernest Milton, who had worn the black doublet himself decades before. That conversation survives, and I have been living inside it for a week.

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June 9, 2026June 9, 2026

Go On Singing, But Sign Your Name: Orson Welles, the Unsigned Cathedral, and the Most Seductive Lie in “F for Fake”

Picture the man. He is past sixty, vast, wrapped in a black cape and a wide hat, and he has just spent an hour lying to your face on purpose. He told you at the start that for the next sixty minutes everything would be true, and you believed him, because the voice belongs to Orson Welles and that voice could sell you the deed to a bridge. Then the hour ran out, and in the last seventeen minutes he spun a whole story about a young woman, her grandfather, and twenty-two forged Picassos, walking you through it as documented fact before turning to the camera to admit he had been, in his own phrase, lying his head off. The film is “F for Fake,” from 1973. With the trick still warm, Welles plants himself in front of Chartres Cathedral, goes quiet and grave and beautiful, and delivers the line everyone carries away: maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.