Back in the days when skin tone was not a criterion for worthy art, I used to attend the opera quite regularly, especially when Mozart, Verdi, or Puccini works were on offer. I mention skin tone because a black American so-called academic, Philip Ewell, claims that Western classical music is rooted ...
NEW YORK—“The City of London Is Hiding the World’s Stolen Money,” screams a Bagel Times headline, as bogus a message as that caricature of a newspaper’s other captions of an antiwhite, anti-cop, anti-male, and anti-Conservative platform. (“Bid the binary goodbye,” is another pearl.) ...
It has stepped into the pop culture spotlight via the HBO hit Succession, a hit job on the very rich and powerful produced by the very rich and much more powerful Adam McKay (The Big Short). McKay started off by doing a lot of cheesy comedies, made a large fortune, and then went after Wall Street ...
Around twenty years or so ago I had point for match point on a perfect grass court in Fort Belvedere. We’d been playing for close to two hours. I remember hitting a topspin backhand down the line and going to the net and seeing my ball just miss the tramline. I was perfectly positioned to call ...
Do any of you remember the time when everything took place on terraces and outdoor cafés? Before everyone retreated into laptops and mobile telephones and Twitter? When possibilities flickered through the streets and the potential of new encounters was everywhere? Well, that’s all gone now, ...
Nice to be back in London, and Glebe Place is a delight. Mind you, it’s not the mansion I was expecting, just a very nice mews house on a very quiet part of the street away from the King’s Road. The noise of the city gets on my nerves, which means I’ve lived on an island and among cows for ...
Memories for me are like beautifully edited copy, all cleaned up and including only the good parts. The wife tells me that I’m quite lucky in choosing to remember just pleasant things, and of course I agree. Actually it’s not even a choice, it is almost automatic; bad things are immediately ...
GSTAAD—Mercedes-Benz heir Mick Flick and I have been friends for over half a century. We both married Schoenburgs, both like the odd drink, both adore the fair sex, and are now both candidates for a visit from the man in the white suit, yours truly first in line. Mick gave a wonderful dinner the ...
GSTAAD—Good manners aside, what I miss nowadays is a new, intelligent, fine-acted movie. Never have I seen so much garbage as there is on TV today: sci-fi crap, superhero rubbish, dystopian garbage, and junk stories about ugly, solipsistic youths revolting against overbearing parents. Director ...
GSTAAD—When Gerald Murphy and Cole Porter discovered the French Riviera as a summer resort during the early ’20s, the swells and avant-gardes still spent the warm months in cool places like Deauville and Baden-Baden. I thought of the deserted summer Riviera and how marvelous the place must have ...
