NEW YORK — The poet was right, April is the cruelest month. We at the Spectator lost Clarissa Tan, my good friend Bob Geldof’s 25-year-old daughter Peaches died, and my oldest friend from prep school buried his son, one of the greatest athletes of his time, at age 42. There is something obscene ...
Back in 1961 a CIA agent and I approached Thomas Lejus, who won the 1959 boys" singles championship for the Soviet Union at Wimbledon. We took him to Café Royal, where Oscar Wilde and Whistler and other such swells used to hang their top hats. The agent spoke first. "Thomas, if you ...
This is a tale of two unpunished crimes in one city. Let’s start with my old friend the Rev. Al Sharpton. I call him an old buddy because about fifteen years ago, in a downtown restaurant, a boxer friend asked the strutting Sharpton if he wanted to meet yours truly. The reverend did not miss a ...
America and Western Europe sure have their priorities right, with newsworthy items blanketing newspapers and magazines while the airwaves reflect our culture. For example, it seems that the April cover of Vogue Magazine, featuring a rap thug and a porn tart, has been covered as extensively as the ...
New York—Back to the mythic city, dreamed into existence by the movies long ago and instantly memorable, a visually stunning place built for action and adventure, a city of broad avenues and narrow side streets, of soaring towers and grubby tenements all giving an air of what Sam Spade in The ...
GSTAAD—Except for the hovering of helicopters overhead carrying great slabs of rock or timber, the constant whirring of cranes and cement mixers, and the roar of trucks, the building site that Gstaad becomes the moment the last billionaire departs for places closer to sea level takes on a ...
On July 1, 1961, a beautiful 17-year-old girl appeared on the cover of Paris Match, back then in its heyday: “C’est une deb,” announced the cover, the once-upon-a-time annual British ritual having passed the Channel to the land of cheese. Her name was Cristina de Caraman, daughter ...
GSTAAD—The American newspaper that prints only news it sees fit to poison good things with recently published an article that dared to ask, “The End of Snow?” “The planet has warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1800s,” it declared, “and as a result, snow is ...
For some fifty years now it seems that God has played a great joke on mankind, granting the best fuel reserves to undeserving desert places run by crooked camel drivers: places such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Libya, Turkmenistan, and other such hellholes. Mind you, God plays fair, and he also blessed ...
Damn, damn, damn! It has to be me, and here all these years I thought it was Hollywood. By the time you read this the Oscars will all be over (like the Olympics), but I had someone play 12 Years a Slave on my television set—it’s called Apple TV, but I’m incapable of making it work on ...
