GSTAAD—It feels like a sepia-tinged melodrama, one directed by the great schlock-master Sam Wood. Driving up the winding valleys through the 17th-century villages and the Castle of Gruyères on one’s right, the heartbeat quickened as Gstaad beckoned in the distance. It meant beautiful women, ...

I was not aware that there is a Spectator/Takimag fan club that meets in French-speaking Switzerland, and having contacted me we have agreed to meet this week up here in Gstaad. A very nice English voice over the telephone informed me of the existence of the group, asked if I was interested in ...

GSTAAD—Lenin Moreno is in trouble despite his very unchristian first name. For any of you unfamiliar with him, Señor Moreno is the president of Ecuador, a tiny South American country that I like very much because if you’ve met an Ecuadorean man, you’ve met them all: There are 16 million ...

I find myself detached from mainstream culture. It started with the demise of nightclubs like Annabel’s, and the people that frequent them with names like Lil Nas X, Dua Lipa, Lizzo, Fat Joe, Pusha T, DaBaby, and others of their ilk. All real names, incidentally, lifted from saccharine, ...

I never thought I’d get back to this silly subject ever again, but the Markles, as I now refer to them, have a way of getting our attention—and embarrassing Al Capone in the process. (As the feds were closing in on him, Al was told Chicago was getting too hot and he should move to Canada. ...

I write this from the once-upon-a-time small alpine village of Gstaad, Switzerland, now a mecca of the nouveaux riches and vulgar, snow and manners having gone with the wind. Global warming is still a maybe, as far as I’m concerned, but the visual evidence right here in the Alps is undeniable. ...

Did any of you know that most of the 20th-century monsters—Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Ceausescu, Duvalier, and even the Ethiopian mini-Napoleon Mengistu—were rather good writers who could form better-than-average sentences that said that power grew out of the barrel of a gun? I read this in a Big ...

GSTAAD—I’ve been hitting the books rather hard lately, the ritzy-glitzy crowd having gone the way of natural snow. There’s great skiing, they tell me, but it’s man-made white stuff, a bit like going to bed with a plastic doll instead of the real thing. I know, skiing is skiing, but it’s ...

GSTAAD—The French have a saying: “Il n’y a rien de plus bête que le sourire du gagnant”; in other words, gloating is for dummies. Hence I won’t be doing it, despite the drubbing handed to the Bercows of this world by so-called common folk. Mind you, at a lunch in a gentlemen’s club in ...

I began my journalistic career under strict censorship. It was imposed on the press and media by the Greek colonels who had seized power in a bloodless coup in Athens on April 21, 1967. Censorship, however, suited me fine. That’s because I was an ardent backer of the coup, the democratic process ...