The Scotsman
Autumn 1988
Denice Speed is one of the night people. Every evening, soon after darkness has driven the office workers away, she and some 6,000 other men and women are bused into the plate-glass and chrome splendour of downtown Washington DC, where they split up and swarm like termites through the buildings that the day [...]
The Scotsman
Autumn 1988
It is twenty one years since the night when a middle-aged Chinese man slipped quietly off his merchant ship in the sprawling harbour of New Haven, Connecticut and padded away into the darkness to become an outlaw.
Behind him in Hong Kong, the man had left his wife and five children living and sleeping [...]
The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
October 3 1988
This is a most peculiar story. It has nothing to do with the Presidential election or the space shuttle or anything else. It does not even really tell you very much about America. It is just peculiar and rather sad.
It concerns a working couple from Pennsylvania, Ernest [...]
The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
September 26 1988
Last week, in Washington DC, two teenage boys were convicted of murdering Kendall Merriweather, aged 17. They had shot Kendall once in the back and then again through the head with a .357 magnum. They did so in broad daylight on a busy street in the nation’s [...]
The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
September 19 1988
It was extraordinarily prescient of the producers of Star Trek to send Captain Kirk off to the final frontier in a star ship called Enterprise, for it now transpires that when the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, took his small step for mankind in July [...]
September 12 1988
America has come to recognise the many faces of George Bush. He is the benign grandfather and the tough conservative, the brave ex bomber pilot and the smart Yale graduate, the millionaire businessman and the loyal deputy, and, of course, the President’s closest pal. But last week, he unexpectedly pulled a new disguise [...]
The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
September 5 1988
The last time I saw the greatest criminal trial lawyer in the world, he was laid out on his sofa like a fallen tree, all six foot four of him, with his huge grey head hoisted up on two white satin pillows and his black walking cane [...]
The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
August 29 1988
The whole state of Mississippi is agog at the goings-on in Jackson, the state capital, which lies in the pine woods and prairie a couple of hundred miles north of New Orleans, a town which has remained an outpost of the old southern way of life, where [...]
The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
August 22 1988
If the new film about the life of Jesus, The Last Temptation of Christ, survives the organised hysteria which is now assailing it, its director Martin Scorsese should give thanks to a frail Russian immigrant to America, who once faced a similar barrage of hostility and was [...]
The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
August 15 1988
The man most likely to become the next President of the United States, Michael Dukakis, has spent much of the last two weeks denying that he has ever been treated for mental illness. This raises two points.
First, there is the curious implication that the American electorate would [...]
