Mark Steyn
December 21, 2024
December 21, 2024
December 21, 2024
December 20, 2024
December 18, 2024

Beyond The Mark Steyn Show:
Columns, poems, tales, music, movies and more from Mark and friends

Rick's Flicks

Stuffed Turkey: Barbara Stanwyck in Christmas in Connecticut

It's 1945, so like any self-respecting romantic comedy with a holiday theme, Christmas in Connecticut opens with a German U-boat torpedoing and sinking an American destroyer. There are only two survivors in a single life raft: quartermaster Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan) and Sinkewicz (Frank Jenks), and Jones is spending his days adrift on the Atlantic dreaming about the slap-up meal he'll have if they get rescued: steak and baked potato with all the trimmings. He dreams about the meal, sitting at a table on the raft in a white dinner jacket eating off linen and china with silver while "Sink" serves him. You have to wonder just how hardened audiences had become by the last months of the war that a film could joke about a situation where ...

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On the Town

Fifty Years of Festive Frank!

Programming note: Join Steyn later this evening for the conclusion of his current Tale for Our Time, Jefferson Farjeon's "Christmas crime story", Mystery in White. We shall have another, very topical Tale for you tomorrow. Also on Sunday Mark will be back for a seasonal edition of our Song of the Week, which airs on Serenade Radio Sunday at 5.30pm Greenwich Mean Time - that's 6.30pm in Western Europe and half-past-noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here. ~On the Christmas edition of Mark Steyn on the Town we present a special edition of our Sinatra Sextet: a full hour of Festive Frank, with friends and family from Nancy Sinatra and Frank Jr to Grace Kelly and ...

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Topical Take

Market Forces

Steyn on the targeting of Christmas...

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Topical Take

A Road Back to Jesusland

Mark looks back on a protean meme, and the insufficiency of "secular humanism"...

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Laura's Links

Canada on the Cusp

Laura Rosen Cohen rounds up the Internet...

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The Mark Steyn Audio Show

Penetrating ze Cabinets

If you missed today's edition of Mark's Clubland Q&A live around the planet, here's the action replay. This week's show ran the gamut from US health care to South Korean fertility via Klaus Schwab penetrating your cabinet. We don't believe Blue Cross Blue Shield covers that...

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Clubland Q&A

Live Around the Planet: Wednesday, December 18th

Steyn fields questions from listeners around the planet...

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Politics & Current Affairs

Not Waving But Droning

When your government lies to you...

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Politics & Current Affairs

What Makes the News, and What Doesn't

Steyn on the media's curious priorities...

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Steyn's Song of the Week

O Tannenbaum

Mark on a Christmas classic that's surprisingly versatile...

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On the Town

This Drover Crossed Over

On this week's edition of Mark Steyn on the Town composer Burton Lane tells Mark about the Sinatra film that got away, and bandleader Artie Shaw recalls the song that got him into showbusiness. Plus an Aussie Yuletide classic, North America's oldest Christmas carol, a franco-Noël blockbuster and the biggest seasonal hit ever to come out of Ukraine...

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Politics & Current Affairs

The Absence of Men

Steyn takes a tour of our unmanned world...

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Steyn Live!

Come Sail With Us!

The Mark Steyn 2025 Cruise is just around the corner... Book your cabin today!

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The Mark Steyn Audio Show

The Road from Damascus

If you missed today's Clubland Q&A, guest-hosted by Laura Rosen Cohen , here's the action replay. Click above to listen...

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Politics & Current Affairs

Assad? Sad!

Before his mid-life career switch to murderous dictator, young Bashar was a respected London ophthalmologist. Yet he failed to read the writing on the wall...

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Steyn's Song of the Week

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

The story of an erubescent proboscis and the brothers-in-law who made it part of the American holiday season....

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Topical Take

Fire and Faith

The sorry state of French Christendom

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Topical Take

The Men Who Walked Away

The thirty-fifth anniversary of the "Montreal Massacre"

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Politics & Current Affairs

Goodnight, Vienna

On Sunday President-elect Trump chose to threaten the ever swelling ranks of BRICS nations:

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Politics & Current Affairs

The Not So Long Goodbye

The future is now, so who's shown up?

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The Mark Steyn Show

The Politicization of American Justice

A rare stage appearance by Steyn, as he returns to America's diseased and depraved capital city for address a Hillsdale College audience on Post-Constitution Day...

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Tales for Our Time

The Prisoner of Windsor

A remote fantastical kingdom far from Europe's chancelleries of power... An unpopular monarch on the eve of his coronation... A ruling class of plotters and would-be usurpers... ...and a gentleman adventurer on holiday. No, not Ruritania in the nineteenth century, but the United Kingdom in the twenty-first...

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Mann vs Steyn

Football and Hockey

The Corner post that launched a lawsuit...

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A Clubman's Notes

A Dead Man Speaks...

n tonight's penultimate episode of Mystery in White, Mr Maltby welcomes a last-minute guest to the snowbound party:

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A Clubman's Notes

A Blizzard of Romance

Welcome to tonight's ante-penultimate episode of Mystery in White - episode twenty-one:

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A Clubman's Notes

When Nurse Makes You Worse

Welcome to Part Twenty of Mystery in White, Jefferson Farjeon's "Christmas crime story" of 1937 and the the latest entry to our series Tales for Our Time. In tonight's episode, our refugees from the snowbound train find they have a Christmas Day intruder:

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A Clubman's Notes

The Dimensions of Mercy

Here we go with Episode Nineteen of Jefferson Farjeon's novel of 1937: Mystery in White. In tonight's episode both the plot and the weather seem to be moving toward some sort of resolution:

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A Clubman's Notes

Shell Shock

Welcome back to Mark's audio serialisation of Jefferson Farjeon's "Christmas crime story" Mystery in White. In tonight's episode, an adventure that began on a snowbound train at Christmas Eve 1937 finds itself, like so much else, caught in the long shadows of the Great War:

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A Clubman's Notes

Upon the Midnight

Welcome to tonight's episode of Mystery in White - a "Christmas crime story" by Jefferson Farjeon set in a warm and cosy English country house where new refugees from the blizzard outside come upon the midnight not so clear and distract everyone but an ailing chorus-girl:

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A Clubman's Notes

The Depth of Her Eyes

Episode Sixteen of our Christmas caper by Jefferson Farjeon, Mystery in White - a novel published in 1937 which starts in a snowbound train on December 24th and follows its protagonists out into a strange and chilling world...

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A Clubman's Notes

Mouthfuls of Snow

In tonight's episode of Mystery in White, Jefferson Farjeon's "Christmas crime story" of 1937, David ventures out of the house in pursuit of a murderer:

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A Clubman's Notes

Rescuing the Girl from a Burning Aeroplane

Episode Fourteen of Jefferson Farjeon's "Christmas crime story", Mystery in White, in which a party of passengers escaping their snowbound train on Christmas Eve seek refuge in an English country house...

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A Clubman's Notes

When the Bed Oppresses You

The thirteenth episode of Mark's current Tale for Our Time: Mystery in White by Jefferson Farjeon...

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A Clubman's Notes

Unsatisfactory Service

Episode Twelve of Mystery in White...

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A Clubman's Notes

Loud Man in Silent Tussle

In episode eleven of Mystery in White, Mr Maltby explains to certain of the party what's going on...

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A Clubman's Notes

The Full Quid

Welcome to the latest in our series of audio adventures, Tales for Our Time. This month's yarn was published eighty-seven years ago, and is revived as the first of this season's Christmas capers: Mystery in White, by Jefferson Farjeon. Episode Ten.

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A Clubman's Notes

No Laughing Matter

Our latest Tale for Our Time charges on: Mystery in White, Jefferson Farjeon's "Christmas crime story" of 1937. Episode Nine.

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A Clubman's Notes

A Very Poor Father Christmas

In episode eight of Mystery in White, Lydia is determined to jolly a snowbound and not terribly compatible house party into an appropriately festive Christmas...

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A Clubman's Notes

A Man in Your Room

It's time for Part Seven of our latest Tale for Our Time: Mystery in White is Jefferson Farjeon's "Christmas crime story" of 1937, and the first of this season's Yuletide capers at SteynOnline.

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A Clubman's Notes

Questions and Answers

Welcome to Part Six of our nightly audio entertainment - Murder in White, Jefferson Farjeon's "Christmas crime story" and the first of this season's Yuletide capers.

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A Clubman's Notes

Feeling for Friends

Welcome to Part Five of the first of this season's Christmas capers: Mystery in White by Jefferson Farjeon, about the adventures of half-a-dozen railway passengers abandoning a snowbound train on Christmas Eve...

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A Clubman's Notes

Not Spoiling Christmas

Here we go with Part Four of our latest audio diversion, and the first of this year's Christmas capers. Our "Christmas crime story", as the publishers bill it, is Mystery in White - a Jefferson Farjeon thriller from the England of 1937...

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A Clubman's Notes

Pulling Her from the Wreckage

Welcome to the third installment of our brand new Tale for Our Time, the first of this season's Christmas capers, written by Jefferson Farjeon and published in 1937. You can enjoy Mystery in White episode by episode, night by night, twenty minutes before you lower your lamp. Or, alternatively, do feel free to binge-listen:

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A Clubman's Notes

Lost in a Wilderness of White

Welcome to Part Two of Mystery in White by Jefferson Farjeon, our latest audio adventure in Tales for Our Time and the first in this season's Christmas capers.

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A Clubman's Notes

Snowed In on the 11.37

Welcome to the sixty-seventh audio adventure in our series Tales for Our Time - and the first of this year's Yuletide capers - Mystery in White, a "Christmas crime story" from 1937 by Jefferson Farjeon, scion of an eminent family, as Mark notes in his introduction, that has given us, among other delights, the definitive Rip van Winkle, a ditty about the Royal Family, and a global pop hit. Part One.

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