Lost opportunity: Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, chats with children during a visit to ActionAid in South Africa in 2019. Judging from photographs like this, you’d have to conclude that she and Prince Harry could’ve been king and queen of the Coomonwealth. It wasn’t enough. Photograph courtesy eNCA.
In the trailer for “Harry and Meghan,” the new six-part Netflix series that dropped like an H bomb Thursday, Dec. 8, with the final three installments on Dec. 15, Prince Harry observes, “It’s really hard to look back on it now and go, “What on earth happened?”
Boy, ain’t that the truth.
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Read MoreLady Susan Hussey, a godmother to Prince William and a lady in waiting to the late Queen Elizabeth II, found herself in the middle of a racial firestorm after she grilled Ngozi Fulani at a Buckingham Palace event to fight gender-based violence.
The Prince and Princess of Wales and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are facing off with different awards in different East Coast cities featuring different members of the Kennedy clan…..In addition to dueling couples in rival cities with different branches of the Kennedy family, we get the contretemps over Lady Susan Hussey’s encounter with Ngozi Fulani at a Buckingham Palace event to fight against gender-based violence.
Read MoreMerrick Garland being sworn in as U.S. attorney general in 2021.Does his appointment of a special counsel for the federal government’s investigation into former President Donald J. Trump just make him look weak? Courtesy The United States Department of Justice.
Early in the Trump Administration, there was a store in Grand Central Terminal that sold novelty gift items, many of them critical of President Donald J. Trump. Some were innocuous enough (a troll doll). Others were too scatalogical for reportage. But one that elicited a chuckle was a take on the old paper dolls that showed pictures of Trump and BFF Vladimir Putin to which you could attach outrageous clothing. It was called “Bad Hombres,” after the phrase
Trump coined to characterize many of the Mexican immigrants thronging the U.S. southern border.
These have not been the best of times for the “bad hombres.” In Ukraine, Putin had to pull back from Kherson. When last seen, he was doing some soothing ribbon-cutting and the generals were managing the retrenchment/regrouping/retreat. On the same day, the Republicans turned in a less-than-stellar performance in the midterm election — setting many to blame Trump for pushing through his chosen election-denying candidates, most of whom went down to defeat, and to anoint Trump archrival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, as the new It Guy for the 2024 presidential race.
Putin and Trump are, however, not going anywhere.
Read MoreRishi Sunak giving his first speech as British prime minister on Oct. 25. Photograph by Rory Arnold/No. 10 Downing Street.
When Princess Anne presented Daniel Craig with the Order of St. Michael and St. George — the same order his character, James Bond, is presented with — all I could think was that right now, we could use 007, Craig, the Princess Royal, St. Michael, St. George, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, Henry V and anyone else who can lend a hand to right the RMS Titanic that is otherwise known as the United Kingdom.
Read More“Elizabeth I (The Rainbow Portrait), attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, (circa 1602), oil on canvas. Reproduced with the permission of the Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House. Image © Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, UK/Bridgeman Images.
They weren’t England’s most successful dynasty. That distinction belongs to the Plantagenets some 300 years of brilliant, beautiful, bloody backstabbers who would’ve eaten the characters on “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon” alive.
But in many ways the Tudors are as fresh and modern as the Windsors in everything from Lucy Worsley’s “Secrets of the Six Wives” docudrama series to Broadway’s “Six” to Starz’s “Becoming Elizabeth.” And that, as a fabulous, beautifully sited new exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan demonstrates, has as much to do with their ability to market themselves as it does with the history of their dynastic ambitions and complicated relationships.
Read MoreEugène Delacroix’s “Medea About to Murder Her Children” (1862), oil painting. Musée du Louvre. The ancient Greek myth — the subject of Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea” at The Metropolitan Opera — has also been misinterpreted, most recently in Maureen Dowd’s column on Vladimir Putin.
In his perceptive eulogy for Queen Elizabeth II, Justin Welby, archbishop of Canterbury, observed: “People of loving service are rare in any walk of life. Leaders of loving service are still rarer.”
Ain’t that the truth. At the risk of sounding like the hammer always in search of a nail, I must nonetheless note once again that we are in an increasing crisis of leadership, from Vladimir Putin’s bungling attempts to conquer Ukraine, which would be laughable if they weren’t so horrific and dangerous, to the ham-fisted handling of Miami Dolphins’ quarterback Tua Tagovailoa’s concussion. (The doctor/consultant who cleared him to play was fired. Really? The team’s front office and ownership should all be fired.
What does it mean to be a leader? it means you are a steward of everything and everyone in your care, a servant of others. It means you take responsibility, even when you are not directly involved in the action. Say what you want about QEII, put she saw herself as a steward, one who remained on the job till her dying day.
For most, however, it’s me, me, me all the time, and it doesn’t help that people don’t really understand this, because they have a limited understanding of culture.
Read MoreRoger Federer at the 2014 Australian Open. Photograph by Peter Myers.
At his Laver Cup in London this weekend — which Team World won over his Team Europe — Roger Federer ended his professional tennis career , a career that has said as much about fans’ perceptions of sports figures as it has about his accomplishments.
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