I met two out of the three women I’ve most admired, and who lived during my lifetime, the one I never encountered having recently passed away. Margaret Thatcher (and her husband, Sir Dennis) stayed with me in Gstaad, the alpine Swiss village that used to be a paradise before Russian and Arab ...
Ooh là là, there’s an election about to take place in the land of cheese and everyone’s commenting about it as if North Korea suddenly decided to go democratic. French elections are like the cancan: always the same, with high kicks and hopes for smaller parties ending like the dance, doing ...
I feel like Diogenes, the Ancient Greek who walked about sunny Athens with a lamp looking for an honest man. And I have found one in Nigel Farage, certainly the last politician who always tells the truth. What I find truly shocking is those who oppose him, the Rothermere press, for example, whose ...
Speaking with a friend who is Jewish—arguing, rather—I reminded him that protesting against the death of innocents is hardly anti-Semitic. He agreed. And yet the death of 37,000 Palestinian noncombatants that have produced nonstop protests in Europe and in the United States are described as ...
Winning at all costs is a double-edged conundrum, especially where sport is concerned. Both my father and uncle were track stars who represented Greece during the Chariots of Fire period. Fair play back then was more important than winning. I was brought up that way, although it was hard to comply ...
He’s physically repellent but writes quite elegantly, from the left, needless to say. He recently took a swipe at us dumb Christians for believing, he being Jewish and referring to our Lord Jesus as a crucified rabbi. Adam Gopnik is his name, and his reference to Jesus Christ was just a name-drop ...
Never mind the cesspool of toxic masculinity in the Vatican, London’s gentlemen’s clubs, and the Greek monasteries of Mount Athos. This is far worse, an insult to all women, especially lesbians, an institutional blackmail that threatens American democracy and unmarried women the world over. ...
Reading a male nitwit interviewing an actress in the Bagel Times reminded me of the manner of a slave while addressing his master. The nitwit writes that “whenever my turns of phrase or tossed-off hand gestures caught her fancy, she’d repeat and refine them, doing them better than I did ...
Okay, enough nostalgia and European tales of love and war. Let’s get back to the awful present, and the god-awful Gaza mess. One side argues that Palestinians have lived under Israeli occupation since 1967 and are fighting for their freedom, the other absolves Netanyahu and the ruling Israeli ...
At the end of World War II, the victorious Allies were convinced that Prussian militarism had played an important part in Hitler’s war in Europe. Herbert Marcuse, an overrated theorist of the Frankfurt School working for Uncle Sam, submitted a secret report that put all the blame for Nazism on ...