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 ...
One of life’s safest bets is that following a visit by a Japanese premier to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the nation’s war dead, a lot of Chinese mega-crooks and inheritors of the greatest murderer of all time will cry foul, and lots of buffoons of the neocon and liberal persuasion ...
GSTAAD—Walking into a dinner party for fifty chic and some not-so-chic people in a nearby village last week, I was confronted by a tall man with horn-rimmed glasses who called me his neighbor but then added, “No, you’re not my neighbor—what’s your name?” No cunning ...
In the movie business, conventional wisdom has it that to succeed at the box office a film must include profanity, obscenity, blood, gore, blasphemy, and, of course, lots of sex. There’s only one little problem with this theory. Empirical data illustrates that the opposite is true. Clean, ...
GSTAAD—“On ne touché pas une femme, meme avec une fleur,” says an old French dictum, one not always adhered to in the land of cheese or anywhere else, for that matter. However hackneyed it may sound—don’t you hate it when a hack declares an interest in order to gain Brownie ...
My first memories of learning were The Iliad and The Odyssey. This was Greece, after all, and although it was mythology, as a three- to four-year-old I took Achilles, Helen, Menelaus, Hector, and Odysseus very seriously. After that came the Persian Wars. My father had just left for the front ...
Call me sentimental, but I’ve never seen a better opening ceremony than the Sochi one, evoking Russia’s great past in literature and many other things. The ballet sequence was tops, especially the acrobatics by the black-clad dancer portraying the cruel officer of War and Peace who ...
