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 ...

GSTAAD—A heavy snowfall diverted some forty-odd private jets from landing in Saanen airport, thus the one percent of the one percent that came to Gstaad for a grand wedding last weekend used conventional travel methods. Actually, it was more of the one hundredth of one percent that lefties ...

GSTAAD"€”From the top of the mountain that overlooks my Swiss chalet I can almost see Lake Geneva"€”on a clear day, that is, but thankfully what I cannot see are the armies of so-called diplomats, flunkeys, arms dealers, professional wallet-lifters, con men, thieves, and men who have been ...

GSTAAD—If a catastrophic avalanche were to crush the Davos convention hall where the fat cats of this world were meeting recently, I’m afraid there would be a lot of discreet raising of glasses by many so-called populists, who are basically envious “haves” that have plenty but don’t ...

OK, folks. We’ve had enough of Hollande and his rather silly antics, although I do understand the man. Ever younger is not a bad policy, in sport as well as in sexual matters, but it does give off a certain bad smell—it’s called a Saatchi—something real men actually never get caught doing. ...