Programming note: please join me for another edition of my still newish weekend music show Mark Steyn on the Town. This week we have a song for the season, the protean concept album, hits from nineteenth-century France and twentieth-century Trinidad, and the word Marianne Faithfull left out. On the Town airs Saturday at 5pm UK/6pm Western Europe/12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~The Mark Steyn Club is not for everyone, but, if you're so inclined, it does have a unique combination of features, including Tales for Our Time, a cavalcade of almost seventy audio adventures in classic but highly pertinent literature, from George Orwell's Animal Farm to H G Wells's Time Machine, via Jane Austen, P G Wodehouse and Baroness Orczy.
Our latest caper is Robert Hugh Benson's 1907 tale of a future of world peace brought about by a charismatic saviour. It's proving very popular with most listeners - but we do have a dissatisfied customer, Jamie Street, a North Carolina member of The Mark Steyn Club:
Does anyone have any idea where this wandering, wordy yarn is headed? The ending had better be jaw-dropping-ly good. Otherwise, it will possibly go down as Tales for Our Time's greatest stinker!
Oh, my. As to where we're headed, in tonight's episode of Lord of the World, there is a hasty flight from Rome to London as our protagonist gets word of the most audacious conspiracy since the Gunpowder Plot:
They passed across the polished floor together; Percy went to his usual place in the window, leaned against the shutter, and spoke.
"Tell me in one sentence, sir," he said to the breathless man.
"There is a plot among..."
Percy cut him short with a gesture.
To listen to the twenty-second episode of Lord of the World, please click here and log-in. If you're late getting started on this current Tale, you'll find the story so far here.
Tales for Our Time began as an experimental feature we introduced as a bonus for Mark Steyn Club members, and, as you know, I said if it was a total stinkeroo, we'd eighty-six the thing and speak no more of it. But we're thrilled to say it's proved very popular, and is now well into its eighth season. If you're a Club member and you incline like Jamie more to the stinkeroo side of things, give it your best in the comments section below. But, either way, do join me tomorrow evening, a few hours after Saturday's Mark Steyn on the Town at Serenade Radio, for Part Twenty-Three of Lord of the World.
