I’ve said it before and will say it again: Fear of the smear is the Israeli lobby’s chief weapon. Here’s Charles Freeman Jr’s., Obama’s choice for a major intelligence post, reasons for dropping out: “The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and ...

Thirty years ago this week my daughter was three and my son had not been born. I had left Gstaad for gloomy, strike-ridden, non-stop power cuts London, and the mother of my children was peeved at me as I had begun circling the daughter of the Belgian ambassador to the Court of St James. The Speccie ...

Vassilis Paleokostas is the Arsène Lupin of the Olive Republic, aka Hellas or Greece. He is by profession a bank robber, known for his impeccable manners but unfortunate jowly, plebeian looks. He is 42 years of age, a ladies’ man, and Greece’s most wanted man. Three years ago, Vassilis managed ...

Nicola Anouilh is the only son of the great French playwright Jean Anouilh—more than 70 plays, including Antigone, Becket and La Sauvage—and a close friend since Paris in the Sixties. He was of a generation just below mine, one that managed to get into Jimmy’s only during the events of May ...

At Easter 1215, a young Tuscan married woman innocently flirted in public with a man not her husband. He flirted back just as innocently, and then things got out of hand. A vendetta was declared between Guelf and Gibel, two rival brothers of Pistoia, that resulted in extreme violence, the splitting ...

Last week I ventured down to Geneva for a meeting with my banker, a gentleman of the old school who did not get carried away by Bernie Madoff’s siren songs. To the contrary, he went as far as Odysseus, tied himself to his desk and plugged up the ears of his underlings. Metaphorically, that is. He ...

A single plug by Sir Roger Moore late last year has turned me into a Papa Hemingway-like literary hero. In his Proust questionnaire in Vanity Fair, Sir Roger was asked to list his favourite writers. Poor little me was mentioned among some good ones and, presto, you’d think I’d written The ...

GSTAAD—If someone bet that The Spectator issue of 10 January outsold or was read by more people than any other weekly — and that includes best selling popular crap like Hello! and OK! — they’d be collecting their winnings as I write. This, of course, in the Bernese Oberland region of ...

So what’s a few hundred dead Palestinian children when Tzipi and Ehud have gained eight to ten points in the polls? They were terrorist babies, anyway. So what if the Egyptians and Saudis are ignoring them while spending millions on hookers, palaces and yachts? The Gazans don’t deserve such ...

When Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet committed suicide just before Christmas, I hoped against hope that others would do the same. No such luck. Villehuchet was an aristocrat, a gentleman and an honest man. He felt responsible for the loss of $1.4 billion and he took the honourable way out. I did ...