Central Park, N.Y.

Central Intelligence

I celebrate two Easters every year, the Catholic and Orthodox one, which means I get very drunk on two successive Sundays. This time both days were spent with very good friends, which is a prerequisite at my age when under the influence. The Orthodox Resurrection ceremony at midnight in the ...

The Racket Behind the Rhetoric

NEW YORK—My friend Douglas Murray is the canary in the Bagel coal mine as of late. The left controls culture, education, and the technology over here, but a few canaries are still free to warn the rest of us that we’re being taken for a ride. Here’s a warning to those multimillionaires who ...

Next Stop, Saint Petersburg?

Back in 2000, Vladimir Putin repeatedly petitioned for Russia to be admitted to NATO, according to George Robertson, former defense minister of Britain, and my friend Oliver Stone, the filmmaker. Putin is now seen as a combination of Hitler and Stalin, a bloodthirsty monster, but when he replaced ...

Yes-Men and Strongmen

The only good news after the massacres in Ukraine is that so many ugly behemoth superyachts have been seized and will not be polluting the seas this summer. There is no more horrible sight than an oligarch’s superyacht on the horizon, and that is before it disgorges its passengers, which is a ...

Groucho Marx

A Fine Line

One hundred years ago, a down-in-the-dumps Joseph Roth wrote to Stefan Zweig, “The barbarians have taken over.” Later on Roth committed suicide, as did Zweig, both talented writers depressed about the state of the world. Reading their correspondence last week, I had to laugh. Neither Roth nor ...

Wildlife Lessons

There is something that has been bothering me of late, and that is my total lack of schadenfreude. The malicious pleasure over someone’s misfortune never counted a lot, but it’s now totally absent, and it worries me. Take for example the case of John Bercow, the preening popinjay show-off whose ...

The Two Nicks

Two weeks ago in St. Moritz I ran into both Nicolas Niarchos and Nicolai von Bismarck, two talented young men and old Harrovians whose parents are friends of mine. This week I was proud to read the former’s byline and to see the latter’s pictures from the war zone in Ukraine. Good on them, the ...

St. Petersburg, Russia

David, Goliath, and Uncle Sam

If Western universities were not brimming with leftist professors, the present situation in Ukraine would surprise no one. History would have taught us that the complete destruction of Nazi Germany was bound to clear the way for Soviet Russia’s domination of the Eurasian continent, although not ...

Tender is the Night, cover of the first edition

A Novel Upbringing

GSTAAD—This is my last week in the Alps and I’m trying to get it all in, skiing, cross-country, kickboxing, even some nature walking along a stream. (I did my last downhill run with Geoffrey Moore, one that ended in a collision with a child at the bottom of the mountain, and I’m thinking of ...

Crime Time

Like a strange melody that keeps repeating in my ear are four letters, PTSD, an acronym for a psychiatric disorder that seems to afflict most criminals in America. I suppose some shrink invented it, then ambulance-chasing lawyers picked it up; finally the criminals themselves have discovered it. It ...