J.P. O'Malley is a journalist and cultural writer based in London and Dublin. He contributed arts and culture pieces to The Weekly Standard between 2013 and 2018, covering topics ranging from biography and architecture to film and music.
If you want to understand the weird and wacky world that David Bowie was inhabiting during what was undisputedly his golden period of creativity, a good place to begin is to watch the 1975 fly-on-the-wall BBC documentary Cracked Actor. It depicts an alien-like-skeleton-figure, with a snow-white…
In his concluding chapter, Owen Hatherley cites a passage from Alexander Herzen’s From the Other Shore (1851), which argued that ideals and aspirations, as they float around in our minds, don't tend to take the same shape when they metamorphose into the material world. Herzen, a political theorist…
On November 8, 1917, Vladimir Lenin gave a rousing speech at the Smolny Institute in Petrograd calling for permanent revolution across all Western democracies. Afterwards, his fellow Bolshevik and founder of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, stood at the podium, warning that “the Russian revolution will…
Between 1942 and 1945, Hollywood produced a plethora of antifascist movies. Of the 1,500 titles released during this period, over half of them referred to the Second World War; 242 made reference to the Nazis, and 190 mentioned Adolf Hitler. The role American movies played in helping the United…