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 ...
What has happened to Wimbledon? A public crying jag would surely have embarrassed Baron von Cramm, a three-time losing finalist, as well as Rod Laver, Roy Emerson, and John Newcombe, all multiple crown winners. Back in my time, Lew Hoad won it and I took him to Les Ambassadeurs nightclub. No one ...
The Spectator lost one of its most loyal readers when Alistair, 9th Marquess of Londonderry, died recently of that most dreaded pancreatic cancer, the very same that had killed his brother-in-law Jimmy Goldsmith fifteen years ago. Alistair would have been 75 in September, an age that Jimmy never ...
Back in September of 1970 I found myself in the charming ancient city of Damascus. The natives were friendly and helpful, especially as I was suffering from food poisoning thanks to a Lebanese kebab I"d eaten two days previously. My stay in the city was interrupted by the sudden death of Gamal ...
ONBOARD S/Y BUSHIDO OFF CORSICA—For the last three days I’ve been watching people 110 years old prancing around bareheaded under a sun so fierce that no Taliban warrior would emerge from under his camel to face it. I tried to speak to the captain of one of these mega-ships, but he mistook me ...
I"ve just had the worst time in my life rubbing shoulders"actually masts"with ghastly ex-Soviet Union gangsters, now called "oligarchs" by the gutter press and the New York Times/Washington Post Camorra. There are also towel-wearing Ay-rabs with obscene boats further polluting ...
It is very still as I sit down to write, the atmosphere heavy and oppressive. They say time flies, but less so if one looks backward. Nearly a thousand years before Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, Emperor Justinian was embarrassed to discover that his Greek subjects were not paying ...
