GSTAAD—Sir Roger Moore told the Sunday Telegraph that he enjoys the slow pace of life in Switzerland. As do I. One cannot have too much of a snowy peak under a blue sky any more than one can have too much of Schubert. Looking out from my bedroom window all I can see are pine forests, rock cliffs, ...
Clive James is weak on health but very strong on intellect, and it’s good to read his pithy television criticism for the Telegraph. Clive recently praised Richard E. Grant for pointing out in his program on the Riviera’s history of pictures that not many people nowadays know how good a painter ...
In a tiny hamlet next to where I live high up in the Swiss Alps, two gay friends of mine have set up house, and a beautiful old chalet it is. One man, a German, looks like a Panzer commander straight out of central casting; the other is an Englishman, more P. G. Wodehouse than John Bull. Both are ...
PARIS—Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter still evoke the verbose sophistry of Sartre, although the tourism and jewelry trades have replaced the rendez-vous des intellectuels. Yet the sheer stunning beauty of the 7eme reminds one why Paris is still the most romantic capital of Europe, ...
On the brilliant summer's morning of June 8, 1967, the USS Liberty, a technical research ship lying in international waters about 25 miles north of the Sinai Peninsula, was suddenly attacked by Israeli fighter jets and Israeli Navy torpedo boats. The Liberty's captain, immediately realizing that an ...
GSTAAD—The subprimate level of conversation, as prevalent as the snow up here in the Alps, took a turn for the better last week when a select few celebrated Prince Nicolas Romanoff’s ninetieth birthday at the yacht club. Yes, most people who live up here are illiterate, but they sure know how ...
New Year's resolutions work only for bores and ambulance-chasing, money-grubbing lawyers. Normal people do not and cannot stick to them. Hence I will list for you my irritants of 2013, hoping against hope that they"ll disappear, but I don"t advise any Taki's Mag reader to hold his ...
GSTAAD—Friends who were among the last to leave Chalet Palataki on New Year’s tell me there were stragglers waiting to be admitted, and this was as the sun was coming up on January 1. My chalet has become the last refuge of the desperate, or among those with twice as much serotonin in their ...
It began late in the afternoon of March 13, 1954. The great Battle of Dien Bien Phu had finally begun. 105mm and 75mm howitzers and 120mm mortars rained down from above. Ten thousand French troops were defending a valley ringed by hills crawling with close to 30,000 Vietnamese. The French commander ...
Lanza is a noble Sicilian name which I believe appears in Il Gattopardo, Lampedusa’s immortal tale of changing times in Sicily during the 1860s. Prince Raimondo Lanza was one of Gianni Agnelli’s best friends until he threw himself off a Roman balcony while suffering a cocaine overdose. I knew ...
