Mad World

It was the North By Northwest comment that set the alarm bells ringing. I’d listened to hundreds of hours of Sam Harris – and read a good deal of what he’d written – and I liked most of what he said, but a few years back he related on his podcast that he and his wife Annaka had walked out of a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest because they found it slow and boring. What?! I thought. Are you kidding me?! It's one of the Master’s greatest suspense thrillers, a brilliant film that harkened back to the likes of Hitch’s own The 39 Steps , while providing something of a template for the James Bond films. And for Harris to say that not only did he not like it, but he had walked out  of it, well, that’s a shocker!  So the warning signs were there. Fast forward to mid 2023 and myself, like many others, have given up on Sam Harris. He’s lost the plot. He’s discredited himself in a number of ways, including infamously telling Triggernometry that he wouldn’t ca...

It’s crackers that in 2023 there are still people prepared to argue that Beatle Paul McCartney was killed in 1966 and was replaced by a double, but this appears to be the view of journalist James Delingpole who, in the always entertaining podcast London Calling , frequently makes this point to Toby Young. James is, of course, wrong. Let’s look at some of the evidence that tells us that the James Paul McCartney who is about to tour Australia is the same person who was born in Walton, Liverpool, on 18 June 1942. In Peter Jackson’s Get Back , a documentary fashioned from early 1969 footage of The Beatles recording what would become their last-to-be-released album Let It Be , we drop in for hours on end on candid conversations between the band members. They frequently talk about their joint past, stuff only the four of them could know, and they jam songs that they used to play in their early days. This includes ‘One After 909’, that John and Paul wrote when they were teenagers, with the...