Back in 1967, during the Six-Day War, I was living in Paris, and such was my pro-Israel ardor, I actually went to some dump and put my name down as a volunteer in case the state of Israel ran out of soldiers. I was asked by the man in charge if I was Jewish, I answered in the negative, and he ...
NEW YORK—The Big Bagel is getting so bad, even the baddies are demanding the fuzz do something. As the body count rises, it is obvious that the victims of violence are predominantly poor and minority. Last week, a woman killed in a drive-by shooting had been attending a vigil for a friend who was ...
Already in your idiot box via Netflix is a miniseries about a man who also used one name, but burned out rather early due to an outsize ego and too much coke. His name was Halston, and his fame was based on the fact he designed a pillbox hat that Jackie Kennedy Onassis wore at her hubby’s ...
NEW YORK—Orthodox Easter Sunday came late in May this year, and I spent it at an old friend’s Fifth Avenue home chatting with his young relatives. During a great lunch I thought of those calendar pages one sees furiously turning while denoting the passing years in old black-and-white flicks. ...
NEW YORK—With the Karamazovian hangover now only a weekly occurrence, the healthy life rules supreme. Well, most of the time. Up early, I go for a brisk thirty-minute walk before breakfast in the park that stretches out two blocks away. I finish off with two sets of twenty push-ups on a park ...
NEW YORK—What follows has been covered ad nauseam, but I wonder why people were surprised at the planned football breakaway Super League. Professional sports in Europe now follow the American way, which means money comes before tradition, hometown loyalty, and lastly the fans, the schmucks who ...
Writing in the London Spectator quite a long time ago—I’ve been a columnist there since 1977—I listed some great Americans, among them General Robert E. Lee, Charles Lindbergh, and Ernest Hemingway. Needless to say, if one were to mention some of these names today in an American publication, ...
NEW YORK—The high life has gone with the wind due to you-know-what—the last time I went to a glittering ball Marie Antoinette still had a head on her shoulders, or so it seems—while sweats and leggings are now ubiquitous during intimate dinner parties. Here in the Bagel, fashion has followed ...
NEW YORK CITY—Ha, ha! What London turned down, the Bagel accepted with alacrity, namely the poor little Greek boy. And it took ten minutes max after disembarking to go through customs and collect my luggage. Kennedy had less people than a gay wedding in Saudi, and then some. Mind you, the Upper ...
It takes a very good writer to produce prose that prompts emotions a reader has experienced in an unconnected past. It also takes a good writer to subtly tip off the reader of the change in the character of the American people, one in which toughness has been replaced by weakness. Talleyrand once ...
