I was not surprised Chuck Hagel had to go. After all, he was among the very few in governments of late who had ever seen combat, not to mention to have been wounded. Men of his ilk do not draw their swords at the drop of a hat, unlike neocons, who demand bloody solutions to every problem, ...
The leaves are falling nonstop, like names dropped in Hollywood, and it has suddenly turned colder than the look I got from a very pretty girl in a downtown restaurant. I had gone outside for a cigarette while dining with Gay Talese, the writer, when two men and a lady came out looking for a cab. ...
To the grand Herrera house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for lunch in honor of Lord and Lady Linley. David Linley is over here to receive an award for his designs, which even rubes like myself where furniture is concerned find wonderful. Princess Margaret’s son is talented, but he’s also ...
Aleko Goulandris is my oldest and closest friend. We met in the summer of 1945, at the Semiramis Hotel in a northern Athenian resort. The Allied bombing and the ensuing communist uprising of 1944 had not been kind to ritzy houses, nor to glitzy hotels. The Semiramis was the only one still operating ...
To Newport, Rhode Island: smallest state in the Union but one of the most beautiful. Driving northeast from the Bagel there’s Long Island Sound on one’s right, and beautifully foliaged farms and towns on the left. The colors are spectacular, golden browns, brick reds, and lemon greens. New ...
Opera has been in the news lately, in Paris and New York, that is. And no, this doesn"t mean things are culturally looking up; on the contrary, I"m afraid. Let's start with the City of Light, where millions of Muslims surround the capital (most of them in the suburbs) waiting for the day ...
Autumn in New York, they even wrote a song about it that was a great hit sixty years ago. Last weekend the sky was awash in blue, Manhattan at its best, with Central Park gleaming in green and only the crowds marring the views. New York has changed dramatically these last fifty years, but what city ...
I have always believed that the mission of post-Fred & Ginger movies has been to reduce, insofar as it lay within their power, the manners and morals of the community. Long before the camera was invented, the ancient Greeks used to throw playwrights in jail for corrupting society, old ...
An intelligent letter from a reader, Stanislas Yassukovich, CBE, warms my heart. It’s nice to know there are others as appalled as I am with today’s so-called elite and their ghastly manners. Good manners, a rarity today, are not a superficial habit. They serve a moral purpose, that of an inner ...
The latest brouhaha about professional football players beating up their little wimmen has me shocked, shocked that such a thing could take place in modern day America, home of the depraved. But before I go on about why black football multimillionaires don"t get enough violence on the playing ...
