Seville—Let’s take it from the top: Seville is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, the capital of Andalusia, situated by the banks of the Guadalquivir River, with a history that predates Greeks and Phoenicians. (Almost as old as Milton Keynes, but slightly more exciting at night.) The ...

As everyone knows, when you cross a camel with a mule, you get a Saudi ruling family member. A camel crossed with a snake produces a Qatari ruler, and finally, a camel having made whoopee with a pig conceives a Kuwaiti sultan. Mind you, I"€™m being a bit rough on these animals, which are, after ...

If cheating is the cancer of sport, losing has to be its halitosis. I stunk up the joint in Amsterdam last week, and even managed to be thrown (a first) for my troubles. Winners, for some strange reason, never have an excuse. Losers tend to. Mine is that my opponent was born after the war, whereas ...

Gstaad—Jeremy Clarke has wiped me out again, for a change. His accounts of the high jinks on board the Spectator cruise had the mother of my children laughing out loud, something she’s not known for among those of us who consider laughing loudly a staggering breach of taste. Never mind, ...

Gstaad—it was the summer of 1953, in Greece. We spent two months together, had a platonic love affair, and then she got married and died soon after. She was older than me, but not by much, and I had turned sixteen that summer. Her name was Maria Agapitou, and she was a rare beauty, at least in my ...

Without the benefit of hindsight I write this on Monday, the 7th—Serena Williams, according to some commentators the greatest woman who has ever graced this earth of ours, will be completing the calendar-year Grand Slam of tennis by winning the United States Open. Even to my trained eye, she ...

On board the M/SQueen Victoria: They remain engraved in my brain, like something out of a Greek tragedy, so beautiful, such legends, and then they were gone. I am referring, of course, to those ocean liners of a bygone era, those romantic boats that dreams were made of, a fantasy world of Aubusson ...

September means football, in high school, in prep school, and, of course, where it all began, in college. There is nothing that evokes F. Scott Fitzgerald times more than a crisp autumn Saturday afternoon, a marching band, a campus full of beautiful coeds, and stands full of rowdy Joe Colleges ...

According to W. Somerset Maugham, materially one must live on the razor’s edge between poverty and minimal subsistence in order to cultivate the life of the spirit. I’ve always respected Maugham’s wisdom and understanding of human nature, and Larry Darrell, in search of a Tao, is among my ...

These are the languid, sensuous days of summer, and I’ve had another birthday, which is the bad news. But it’s the silly season, so I’m going to be silly yet again and tell you about a couple who got into trouble last week in the land of cheese: Patrick and Isabelle Balkany. I do not know ...