I celebrate two Easters every year, the Catholic and Orthodox one, which means I get very drunk on two successive Sundays. This time both days were spent with very good friends, which is a prerequisite at my age when under the influence. The Orthodox Resurrection ceremony at midnight in the cathedral was followed by a sumptuous Greek dinner at a gastronomic Hellenic restaurant hosted by George and Lita Livanos that ended at ...

NEW YORK—My friend Douglas Murray is the canary in the Bagel coal mine as of late. The left controls culture, education, and the technology over here, but a few canaries are still free to warn the rest of us that we’re being taken for a ride. Here’s a warning to those multimillionaires who get down on one knee every weekend to make themselves feel better for getting lotsa moola playing a game in the sun. It has to do with ...

Back in 2000, Vladimir Putin repeatedly petitioned for Russia to be admitted to NATO, according to George Robertson, former defense minister of Britain, and my friend Oliver Stone, the filmmaker. Putin is now seen as a combination of Hitler and Stalin, a bloodthirsty monster, but when he replaced the drunken Yeltsin in 2000 the West was eager to deal with him. Boris Yeltsin had also made overtures for NATO admission, and even ...

The only good news after the massacres in Ukraine is that so many ugly behemoth superyachts have been seized and will not be polluting the seas this summer. There is no more horrible sight than an oligarch’s superyacht on the horizon, and that is before it disgorges its passengers, which is a horror show in itself. Arab boats are even worse, as are the hookers on board. The other good news is that Elon Musk has become the ...

One hundred years ago, a down-in-the-dumps Joseph Roth wrote to Stefan Zweig, “The barbarians have taken over.” Later on Roth committed suicide, as did Zweig, both talented writers depressed about the state of the world. Reading their correspondence last week, I had to laugh. Neither Roth nor Zweig had experienced Hollywood, and obviously would have killed themselves much earlier had they known the place and its values. ...

There is something that has been bothering me of late, and that is my total lack of schadenfreude. The malicious pleasure over someone’s misfortune never counted a lot, but it’s now totally absent, and it worries me. Take for example the case of John Bercow, the preening popinjay show-off whose physical stature matches the respect he earned as Speaker. I can’t think of anyone I found more irritating, unfair, and unfit for ...

Two weeks ago in St. Moritz I ran into both Nicolas Niarchos and Nicolai von Bismarck, two talented young men and old Harrovians whose parents are friends of mine. This week I was proud to read the former’s byline and to see the latter’s pictures from the war zone in Ukraine. Good on them, the Fourth Estate can do with talented amateurs rather than world-weary pros. But don’t get me wrong. By amateurs I mean those who ...

If Western universities were not brimming with leftist professors, the present situation in Ukraine would surprise no one. History would have taught us that the complete destruction of Nazi Germany was bound to clear the way for Soviet Russia’s domination of the Eurasian continent, although not going for total victory would hardly have been a vote-getter back in 1945. George Patton, for one, wanted to fight the bear right ...

GSTAAD—This is my last week in the Alps and I’m trying to get it all in, skiing, cross-country, kickboxing, even some nature walking along a stream. (I did my last downhill run with Geoffrey Moore, one that ended in a collision with a child at the bottom of the mountain, and I’m thinking of calling it quits in downhill skiing for good.) The trouble with athletes is that early on we enact the destiny to which we are all ...

Like a strange melody that keeps repeating in my ear are four letters, PTSD, an acronym for a psychiatric disorder that seems to afflict most criminals in America. I suppose some shrink invented it, then ambulance-chasing lawyers picked it up; finally the criminals themselves have discovered it. It is the quickest get-out-of-jail scheme since article 1 section 9 of the Constitution, Habeas Corpus. We are in the midst of ...

ST. MORITZ—Once upon a time, not that long ago, St. Moritz was the world’s greatest resort, an exclusive winter wonderland for royalty, aristocrats, and shipping tycoons. I’d say the place reached its peak during the ’40s until the late ’60s, and like the rest of the great old resorts around the world, it’s been downhill ever since. The reason for this is obvious: The newly rich barbarians outnumber the old guard, ...

Was it Socrates who said that chaos was the natural state of mankind, and tyranny the usual remedy? Actually it was Santayana, and boy, did he ever get it right. My friend Christopher Mills has given me a terrific book, The Wages of Destruction, by Adam Tooze, about the breaking of the Nazi economy. I thought I knew everything there is to know about that period, but I hadn’t thought of global economic realities, the ones that ...

GSTAAD—I cross-country ski the old-fashioned way, not skating but on machine-made narrow tracks. It is known to be the best exercise in the world, both upper and lower body getting the maximum workout as one churns along a beautiful course in Lauenen, a tiny nearby village that looks like Gstaad did sixty years ago. I used to bring my children to the lake here during the summer, warning them time and again about a horrible ...

GSTAAD—Okay, sports fans, have you been enjoying the concentration-camp Olympics? I’m sure the Uighurs in the Chinese gulag are riveted, especially watching the downhill, the trouble being most of the one million Muslim prisoners have been issued Equatorial Guinea-made TV sets, apparatuses that only film crocodiles swallowing humans. Joe Biden, in the meantime, has steered clear of the Games and has sent a message via ...

GSTAAD—Joan Didion, who died December last, took herself extremely seriously. American writers tend to do that, especially those whose books are unreadable, the kind that win prizes and get reviewed by the Bagel Times. Pretension aside, however, Didion was a hell of a writer, a stylist who modeled her patterns on Papa Hemingway’s instructions. We never met, but I knew enough to stay away because of a joke I played on ...

During the late ’50s I was on the European tennis circuit and was ranked among the lowest. I was No. 3 in Greece but back then Greece was hardly a tennis power, unlike today (No. 4 among men and 6 among women). In 1957 the American Althea Gibson won Wimbledon and became the first black player to win a major. She and I were friends and used to hit together. During the Rome tournament another friend, the great Italian Nicola ...