There is no doubt in my mind that we wish our destruction. What else could it be? An Elders of Zion plot? Hardly. They would be among the first to go down, although unlike us, they would put up a fight. The only thing I can think of is extreme stupidity. Take the cases of John McCain and Lindsey ...
ONBOARD THE WEATHERBIRD OFF THE PELOPONNESE—The old girl groans and creaks as we tack time and again, the breeze right on the nose as we negotiate the turquoise coastline. She’s gaff-rigged and good upwind, the only annoyance being the ubiquitous speedboats driven by fat Greeks who come by for ...
PORTO HELI—I am standing on the deck of a 100-foot schooner that was built in Normandy in 1931 by Gerald and Sara Murphy, the golden American couple who invented the south of France as a summer playground and were in the forefront of artistic and literary Parisian life at the time. More ...
GSTAAD—This is a tale of two men. One possesses youth, talent, fame, and even beauty; the other none of the above except arrogance, physical repulsiveness, and a sexual impudence that fits perfectly into our porno-centric culture. Both, however, need to quit their respective professions; the ...
If I hear or read one more American hack mentioning the word “democracy” regarding Egypt and the Middle East, I swear on Joe Biden’s hair-implanted head that I shall go in front of the Capitol and commit ritual seppuku, the Japanese warrior’s way of leaving this life. (Just ...
THUN, SWITZERLAND—”Mokuso!” All 200 of us who are already on our knees and sitting on our heels in the Japanese “seiza” position remain dead silent at the command. No loud breathing, no movement whatsoever, just “mizu no kokoro,” a calm mind, like the surface ...
I am about to leave for karate camp in Thun, Switzerland: four days of double sessions lasting one hour and forty-five minutes each, with three hundred black belts from all over Europe and North America attending. I’ll give you all the details next week once I’m safely back home and on my way ...
I remember it well. It was July 1952, and I was dining with my parents at the Palm Beach Casino’s patio in Cannes when my father got up and went inside to gamble. He came back rather excited and told us that a friend of his, Greek ship owner George Coumantaros, had passed eight hands at baccarat ...
The long lazy summer is upon us, and as I walk the Swiss hills below the mountain ranges my thoughts are always of the past. I think of long hot summers of long ago: girls in their pretty dresses and my father in his whites sailing around the Saronic Bay with a ball-and-chain standard flying from ...
What was that quote about London and being tired of life? Or that flickering ecstasy of a long-ago memory of being drunk at dawn and watching people going to work? Surely not at my age and in the year 2013, but there you have it. You can go home again; Thomas Wolfe had it all wrong. I felt at home ...
