Roman Polanski

Q and A-holes

GSTAAD—I thought of Nietzsche while the mayhem and destruction of monuments were going on, and his dictum of strengthening the strong and paralyzing the weak as a means of producing a higher type. Decadent bourgeois society was in the great man’s sights, but then he went bananas. Later on, ...

Madness Is Contagious

GSTAAD—Oh, to be in America, where cultural decay and self-destruction compete equally with hyperfeminist and anti-racist agendas. Gone With the Wind is suddenly as popular as Triumph of the Will is in Israel, and the great Robert E. Lee’s statue in Richmond is as likely to remain upright as a ...

Vienna, Austria

Waltzing With Taki

VIENNA—Somebody once described Vienna as a top opera performed by understudies. The remark was unquestionably witty, but utterly false back when it was made. It is perfectly true for today, however. During the 650-year rule of the Habsburgs, Vienna reigned supreme, an opera sung by its greatest ...

Tyrol, Austria

Papou Was a Rolling Stone

AUSTRIA—I finally understand what’s wrong with the modern world: motorways! These dehumanizing slabs of asphalt lining our continents are Prometheus-like chains luring us to nonstop movement and uniformity. But before you start screaming that you’ve been isolated for months and would give up ...

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper

People Are Overrated

Solitude is a blissful disengagement from the horrors of modern-day life, even if forced upon us by a government lockdown. The trouble with the present situation is the idiot box. The enforced solitude would be a blessing—it tends to breed spirituality—but for the escapism of television. The ...

Baby Talk and Bad Language

GSTAAD—Well, Theodora did not wait and I missed yet another grandchild’s birth. (The prettiest little blue-eyed thing ever, if I say so myself.) Funny thing is, I’ve never been able to be there when it counts. I missed my daughter’s birth because I was playing tennis in Palm Beach and got ...

Greetings From Slobovia

GSTAAD—The staff is back and all is well, as they used to say long ago in faraway places. The gardener and the cleaner are Portuguese, and they greet me with their inherent dignity from afar. The Philippine maid and cook almost gets me in a headlock trying to thank me for keeping her on salary ...

Another Pandemic

GSTAAD—Hippocrates is known as the father of Western medicine, and he diagnosed and named the disease “micropoulaki” during the Periclean period, around 430 BC. He did not call it a virus, but a sickness of the brain. Some years later, Aristotle described the micropoulaki syndrome as a ...

The China Syndrome

GSTAAD—Two years or so ago I had back-to-back New York luncheons with Steve Bannon, and boy, did some of his predictions and fears ever come true! Bannon’s White House days as chief adviser to The Donald were numbered right off the bat. He had only one agenda, and that was China. When talking ...

Lady Prue Penn

From Great Boredom Come Great Tales

When indolence becomes intolerable, remembrances of things past become a lifesaver. Charles Moore’s recent Spectator notes also helped; for example, his stories about the 94-year-old Lady Penn, who is the Queen of England’s closest childhood friend. It must be at least thirty years or so ago, ...