Christopher Sandford is a British-born writer who now makes his home in the Pacific Northwest. He's the author of many books, including Union Jack, a bestselling account of John F. Kennedy's special relationship with the United Kingdom.
Posts by Christopher Sandford
June 03, 2024
Should we blame Max Brod? Brod was almost certainly the nearest thing Franz Kafka ever had to a friend, and in time Kafka appointed him his literary executor. The instructions he gave were unequivocal: all the work that remained unpublished on his death, which came on June 3, 1924, including three novels and a large number of stories, was to be promptly destroyed.
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January 19, 2024
Whenever I read a story involving one of the profusion of holy relics preserved and exhibited over the centuries, whether it be the Shroud of Turin or the finger bone of the fifth-century patroness Saint Genevieve, to this day displayed in a small glass cylinder in the Chapel of St.
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August 02, 2023
You’re facing the Cy Young Award–winning pitcher Justin Verlander from a distance of 22 yards, armed only with a three-foot long, paddle-shaped club and your own nerve. To enliven the proceedings, Verlander interacts with you not from the traditional essentially static crouch, but after a headlong sprint from the outfield to the pitcher’s mound, at the climax of which he hurls a cherry-red leather ball in the general direction of your ankles.
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January 25, 2023
As the producers of the venerable James Bond franchise come to ponder how best to refurbish their hero for the uncertain times ahead—a woman, perhaps, and/or a person of color?—a small but persistent debate among film buffs continues to address the chicken-and-egg dilemma of which came first: Have the actors successively playing Bond over the past 60-plus years consciously fine-tuned their performance in response to all the eddies in fashion and culture, or have they been ahead of the curve in defining the limits of an acceptable sort of male behavior for the rest of us to emulate?
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September 15, 2022
In 1959, when Richard Condon published his political thriller
The Manchurian Candidate, he took a topical idea and ran amok with it. The idea was that during the Korean War a platoon of GIs had been captured by the Chinese, brainwashed (“not just washed, but dry-cleaned”), and released back home to do the enemy’s bidding.
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August 17, 2022
Someone once said of Steve McQueen (1930–80) that his range as an actor was deep but not very broad. All right, I admit it—I said it in my 2001 biography of the all-American star who still looms over Hollywood like a sort of male equivalent of the Statue of Liberty, more than 40 years after his untimely death.
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April 26, 2022
According to an old Hollywood commonplace, nothing can beat the plot of a good sci-fi film when it comes to predicting the future. Many of the promotional taglines that accompany these features assure us that, should we invest in a ticket, we’ll be “entertained” and “educated,” or even “enlightened,” by a product that “presciently signifies the all-but-inescapable fate of our planet” (
2012), that warns of a future that “looks, feels, and almost tastes and smells like a nightmare vision of our times” (
1984), or that offers a “harsh but searingly urgent” glimpse of the overall prospects for mankind (
Blade Runner).
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March 17, 2022
We may live in benighted times, but consider the world of just over a hundred years ago. Recurrent cultural or political shock, and often premature or violent death, was quite familiar to the generation emerging in the early years of the 20th century.
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February 23, 2022
What would Kurt Vonnegut have made of the accordion-style cycle of lockdowns and other restraints imposed on us by the seemingly permanent American sanitary dictatorship devoted to the religion of health in this the centenary year of his birth?
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