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A Tale of Two Dragon Ladies

Mme. Nhu, who died five days before THE wedding, was a hell of a woman. When she was captured by the commies in Hue in 1946, she stood up to them until the French rescued her four months later. She was anti-French and anti-commie, yet the Western press named her the Dragon Lady, a nickname she ...

Linda Christian

No Flowers for Charlie Sheen

Gone are the days when I used to wear a tux to go see a Broadway show. These days I feel overdressed wearing a sport coat and necktie. I used to go to Broadway a lot when I was young. My girlfriend at the time, Linda Christian, was an actress known for her romances more than her screen credits. ...

Marcus Aurelius

Monarchy: The Fairest of Them All

How fair a rule is monarchy? A Byzantine scholar wrote that it was the fairest, to the point that God sustained it, as long as the emperors were elected by the army or an aristocratic senate. With their coronation, legitimate successors and usurpers alike automatically became sacred. The ancient ...

Robert E. Lee

Robert E. Lee Forever!

Tuesday last, April 12, one hundred and fifty years ago, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces fired the first shots on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The bombardment lasted 34 hours, and Fort Sumter occasionally replied with fire of its own. Then the white flag ...

The Middle East for Dummies

Let's play the "€œWhat If?"€ game for a minute. What if I had written this column in October 2002 and some eagle-eyed aide to George W. Bush had noticed it and shown it to his moron boss? Had the moron read it and taken what I"€™m about to write into consideration, Uncle Sam might be one ...

Kate Winslet

Raging Against the Moderns

NEW YORK—I went to see a revival of Arcadia in the beautiful Ethel Barrymore Theatre last Saturday night, and it made my day. Tom Stoppard is our greatest playwright, and I think Arcadia is his best play, although a couple of his other gems come close. I was with Marine Major Michael Warring and ...

Mutassim Gaddafi and Hillary Clinton

News to Make One Vomit

This is the most outrageous proposal since Nero named his horse a senator. The suggestion that two of Gaddafi’s sons may inherit his mantle and a deal struck with the coalition is not even material for broken down comedians plying their trade in whore houses. Saif and his brothers have more ...

Sandra Bullock

From Beautiful Bullock to Ghastly Gaddafi

NEW YORK—They say when sexual attraction sets in, all other brain functions shut down. It’s nature’s way of ensuring procreation. My brain shut down last week, and for a Hollywood actress to boot. Of German extraction, Sandra Bullock is not the classic Aryan goddess, but she’s most ...

Anne Roiphe

The Big Bagel Bites Back

NEW YORK—Twenty-two years or so ago, I wrote a column for The New York Observer, a weekly paper owned by a tycoon named Arthur Carter. He had come up the hard way and made his fortune in Wall Street but retained his loathing for those who had made it the old-fashioned way, mainly by inheriting ...

Barbarians at the Gate

GSTAAD—I’ve got the end-of-season blues. I know I say this every year, but this has been a particularly fun winter, with friends throwing goodbye parties, dinners, and lunches since the beginning of March. My liver has done a Gaddafi and taken a brutal revenge on my body. The right ankle is ...