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 ...
I’ve spent most of the summer sailing around the Greek Isles and reading up on the Spartans. Why the Spartans? Well, both of my mother’s parents were Spartans, and their parents and grandparents also; in fact the line goes back a very long way. Our house in Sparta I visited 25 years ago, but it ...
GSTAAD—It seems to be open season on royals, starting with Prince Andrew and the charges against him by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a graduate of the Jeffrey Epstein finishing school. I’ve met Andrew a couple of times, but he wouldn’t know me from Adam. I’ve never met anyone who has had ...
CORONIS—Embracing one’s vulnerability seems to have replaced the higher, faster, stronger emblem of the Olympics. The very frailty that makes us human seems to have won over the need to excel, or so the Games’ sponsors tell us. Not that I watched any of it. Not a single second, so help me ...
PATMOS—A very long time ago I wrote right here that spending a summer on the Riviera or the Greek isles without a boat was as useless as a eunuch in a cathouse. That was then and this is now, alas. The French and Greek seas are the same, if a little bit more crowded, but the people with boats are ...
