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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
The front page of the New York Post on the 20th of April, 2020, said it all: a large crowd in front of a Brooklyn barbershop being dispersed by police after a riotous party. There was no social distancing, just glum faces full of aggression and contempt for the fuzz. There was not a single white ...
So the days dwindle down, September, November... This once-peaceful alpine town is packed with rich refugees fleeing the you-know-what from nearby cities crammed with real migrants. There isn’t an empty apartment left, and the locals are raking it in. Two good friends have died, the village is ...
Aristophanes was a comic genius before the Marx Brothers, but he also gave good advice to the Athenians: Stop the war! In his play Lysistrata he had the women going on strike—no more nookie—until the men stopped fighting. During the plague that killed the greatest Athenian of them all, ...
As everyone who has not been in strict isolation in hospital with the virus knows, Harvey Weinstein was recently condemned to death for sexual assaults against six Hollywood wannabes. Actually, he was sentenced to 23 years in jail, but in view of his age of 67, it would have been far more dramatic ...
