The dinner party at an old friend’s house was as chic as it gets. Then a Trump insider asked, “Who is the American president who had an affair with a French president’s wife?” It was an easy one. And it’s been out there for years: The Donald has claimed he did Carla long before she got ...
Much like the poor, the charity ball has always been with us, but lately it’s turned into a freak show. Something is rotten in the state of New York, and the name of it is the Met Gala. Once upon a time, the Metropolitan Museum’s gala ball was fun. Serious social-climbing multimillionaires ...
I’m sitting in my office room and the place is still. The rest of the house is dark. Everyone’s out and I’m here writing about the death of a friend. I haven’t felt such gloom since my father died 28 years ago. The question of Why did he have to die? is implicitly followed by that of How ...
Twenty-five years ago this week, Los Angeles was burning because of Rodney King’s beating by the fuzz and I had my shoulder sliced open by a doctor in order to repair torn ligaments. My shoulder hurt more than Rodney’s ribs, because I saw him on TV get up and gesticulate freely after being ...
If any more proof were needed that Brexit is the best thing to happen to Britain since 1066 and all that, here it is: Geologists have at last assembled a picture of the forces that tore a 10 million-year-old land bridge away and turned Britain into an island, rather than a peninsula of Europe like ...
If the Clintons were not as down-market as they are, they would have fit in perfectly in 15th-century Florence, the city that gave us Botticelli and Cellini, and also the Medici, the Borgia, and, of course, Machiavelli. Renaissance Florence was not confined to painting and literature; quite the ...
NEW YORK—Things that I once loved (Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, brownstone terraces on hot summer afternoons, cold beer and fried eggs on 59th and 5th at 5 a.m. after a night of carousing, the Sherry-Netherland) and miss today have grown ever more monumental upon reflection. I suppose it’s ...
I’d gladly exchange waistlines with him if he’d teach me to cut a phrase the way he does—in print, that is. I’m talking about none other than The Spectator’s “Brute” Anderson, whose style of writing I particularly admire but find impossible to emulate. But I have an excuse: English is ...
My last week in the Alps, with the snow gone, replaced by brilliant sunshine, and the silence broken by the occasional clear, sharp wind. The town is now empty and clean, and the air bracing. I love the village out of season, the shoppers finally gone, the locals preparing to free the cows to get ...
William F. Buckley spent his adult winter months in Rougemont, an alpine resort next to its chicer neighbor Gstaad, now a mecca for the nouveaux riches and vulgar. Throughout the "60s and "70s, however, the area was known for its music festival run by Yehudi Menuhin, and for celebrity ...
