NEW YORK—Seeing Manhattan rising from the distance is always a treat. I am not sure it’s possible for anyone brought up around these parts to appreciate entirely what New York—the idea of New York—meant to us who came from the Old Continent. I was eleven years old and had seen only war and ...
Papa Hemingway’s recently published letter to an Italian male friend purportedly revealed the “human side” of which his admirers were already well aware. (Like Bogie, he was tough on the outside, jelly on the inside.) Until lately, Papa’s haters had a good long run. Soon after Carlos ...
Dr. David Starkey is a great man, a Tudor historian, and one of the few academics who tells it like it is. Openly gay, he has no time for prancing queens and other such clown minorities trying to steal a bigger slice of the freebie pie. After England’s riots last summer—while politically ...
In the February 18 issue of the world’s greatest weekly I wrote that I had fallen madly in love with Jessica Raine, the actress who portrays nurse Jenny in the Sunday-night BBC show Call the Midwife. In the throes of demonic, erotic exhilaration, I may have piled it on a bit thick. So what? If ...
Here we go again, sports fans! During a recent tennis match between two professionals in Indian Wells, California, a racial comment uttered by one of the players has the usual suspects up in arms. The newspaper that only prints what fits PC, the dreadful Big Bagel Times, was among the first to ...
GSTAAD—It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas: nonstop snowfall, an empty main street, and the closing of the Palace hotel as well as the Eagle club. (I give the traditional closing-day speech at the club, and my oration this year was deemed politically incorrect.) The older I get the more ...
Who was the first to declare that nothing counts a lot and very little counts at all? The cynic and sesquipedalian Alastair Forbes claimed it, but he spoke with a forked tongue. Iris Murdoch hinted that it was hers, but she, too, was known for bending the truth. Either way, the saying is utter ...
Briefly home from boarding school back in 1951, I went to a bar with a phony draft card, ordered a beer, and watched Rocky Marciano knock out my idol Joe Louis. Joe was 37 and trying for a comeback, as he was broke—and as he sat in his stool after having been counted out, he looked a lot older. ...
When the bloated and declawed Las Vegas casino-money recipient Newt Gingrich had some fun recently over Mitt Romney's ability to speak a few words of French, Europeans took notice of this farce. The French are an angry nation: envious, supercilious, and eager to show superiority over those who ...
A couple of weeks ago I wrote in this here mag about Syria. I played it safe. My point was that Assad was not as bad as what may come after him. I now know better. In the long sweep of history, those who play it safe are more often than not wrong. Here's a tip: If you want to get it right, choose ...
