So the miracle has happened. A generation has been inspired and millions of children have been driven away from their televisions and handheld devices and have gone out on the track, running, jumping, throwing. Faster, higher, stronger. Thank you, Olympic Games, and see you down in Rio. And now ...

With the exception of the French Academy immortals Michel Déon and Jean d’Ormesson, two wonderful writers and both the epitome of charm and graciousness, the French can be a pretty silly lot. They weren’t always. They got that way sometime between the two great wars. They turned even sillier ...

GSTAAD—My chalet lies far above the village of Gstaad, but I happened to be en ville when I heard the pleasant sounds of an Oom-pah band and saw the Swiss burghers dressed up in their finest lederhosen marching through. It was a magnificent morning, the mountains glistening in the sun, the air ...

GSTAAD—If the London Olympics do not go down in history as The Crying Games, I will perform a sex act on a Mae West hologram in Times Square as the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve. What’s most confusing is that winners cried much more than losers. Their tears made the place look like ...

Thucydides carefully structured his Peloponnesian War history as a cautionary tale about the moral decay that accompanies abuses of imperial power. “It is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can,” said the Athenians blandly to the denizens of Melos before slaughtering ...

Gore Vidal was as good as it gets where writing is concerned. I can"€™t think of a single awkward sentence he ever wrote, and he wrote a hell of a lot for someone from a very privileged background who could do more enjoyable things than sit behind a typewriter. He wrote twenty-six novels, among ...

Nicholas Soames is Winston Churchill's grandson, a Conservative member of Parliament since the early 80s, a very large man whose food and drink intake is legendary, and an old friend of mine with whom I used to get into terrible trouble. Soames has been married twice, his first wife having ...

GSTAAD—Purity in a sport does not mix with popularity, and defending the former is anathema to the hucksters, crooks, and profiteers who encourage the latter. In this I do not include the sportswriters of serious newspapers, with whom I sympathize. They see what’s going on, but they have to ...

The British public periodically goes ape over silly things such as cricket, Twiggy, the occasional sunny day, the Chelsea Flower Show, Guy Fawkes Night, and the not-so-direct descendants of King James I, whom Guy (AKA Guido) tried to blow up on November 5, 1605. Although James I was a Stuart and ...

GSTAAD—Mountains in summer have a faraway astral beauty, snowy and shrouded in cloud peaks like old men wearing spats. Danger lurks in such mountains. Colin Thubron wrote about Tibet’s Mount Kailas, where locals offered sacrifices to Yama, the Buddhist god of death. Only last week eleven people ...