GSTAAD—It is hard to imagine we have reached the year 2022 and still impose completely irrelevant restrictions on each other. By “we” I mean those of us in the supposedly enlightened West, where silliness, jealousy, cruelty, and wokeness rule the roost. I’ll begin with the Chinese virus that has contrived to dominate the headlines even more than Boris Johnson and Meghan Markle put together. I got Covid following my ...
A few weeks after Friedrich Nietzsche bragged to an admirer that he had completed a ruthless attack on our Lord, he collapsed, had convulsions, shouted like a madman, and never recovered his faculties again. It was the autumn of 1888. He was 44 years old, his books had just begun to be noticed, and he lived for a decade longer, empty-eyed, silent, and entirely unaware of the fame that was about to engulf him. Was his tragic ...
Imagine a European country today in which a newspaper of its most populous city launches a totally mendacious project reinterpreting its past. The practice was perfected during the old communist system that ruled Romania, Hungary, Poland, and the rest of the Soviet satellites. But it is no longer possible now that the old continent has rediscovered freedom. The place where such a big lie is taking place is right here in New ...
NEW YORK—It’s party time in the Bagel, and it’s about time, too. Good restaurants and elegant nightclubs are now a thing of the past, at least here in the Bagel, so it’s home sweet home for the poor little Greek boy, for dinner, drinks, and even some dancing at times. Here in my Bagel house my proudest possessions are my three Oswald Birley pictures. One is enormous and covers the whole wall of the entrance hall. The ...
Jon Gruden, an NFL head coach with a $100 million contract from the Las Vegas Raiders, was recently forced to resign after making what the Ebony Times called racist, homophobic, and misogynistic remarks in emails over the past twelve years. Shock horror, pro footballers making misogynistic remarks, why I never heard of such a thing, it’s definitely un-American. Call the midwife, or better yet, the fuzz. Gruden won a Super ...
NEW YORK—Will the American media ever face a reckoning for its fake Russia collusion and anti-Trump hysteria that lasted close to four years and was the main weapon of the lefty media against the Donald? Yes, if you believe in Santa Claus, as in Claus von Bulow, but otherwise not on your life. The left lies nonstop and when it gets caught it lies some more. Do not expect the Bagel Times to ever apologize or even correct its ...
NEW YORK—I’ve never met anyone named Othello, certainly not in Venice nor in Cyprus, but perhaps there are men by that name in Africa. The only one referred to as Othello, but always behind his back, was the greatest of all Russians, Alexander Pushkin: “As jealous as Othello but twice as dark,” was what les mauvaises langues in court called the great poet. Pushkin had a great-grandfather general who was Ethiopian. ...
NEW YORK CITY—Don’t let anyone tell you the Bagel is worse off than Kabul, where three people were recently shot dead by Islamic gunmen for playing music at a wedding. No sirree, people over here are shot every day and night, but not for playing music at a wedding. Give New York credit where it’s due. The city is a bloody horror if you’re living way uptown, way downtown, or in the Bronx, while the rest of Gotham is ...
There’s a narrow stretch of Chelsea south of the King’s Road from Oakley Street to Ormond Gate that reminds me of postwar London when I first came here with my dad. Names like Margaretta Terrace, St. Loo Avenue, Alpha and Robinson Streets bring back sweet memories of youthful innocence and desire. London back then was big on rep but dead last in comfort. Much later, during the end of the ’50s, Queen’s Club held the ...
I find most films nowadays as fascinating as a lengthy history of orthodontics, but then I’m spoiled rotten having watched old black-and-white pearls such as From Here to Eternity, The Asphalt Jungle, and Our Man Godfrey. When Chariots of Fire came out some forty years ago I went bananas. My uncle had competed in both the ’32 and ’36 Olympics in the hurdles, and my father was on the relay team. Athletics back then were ...
Back in the days when skin tone was not a criterion for worthy art, I used to attend the opera quite regularly, especially when Mozart, Verdi, or Puccini works were on offer. I mention skin tone because a black American so-called academic, Philip Ewell, claims that Western classical music is rooted in racism. Phil also thinks that Ludwig van Beethoven is kinda useless, and that our reverence for classical music is just an ...
NEW YORK—“The City of London Is Hiding the World’s Stolen Money,” screams a Bagel Times headline, as bogus a message as that caricature of a newspaper’s other captions of an antiwhite, anti-cop, anti-male, and anti-Conservative platform. (“Bid the binary goodbye,” is another pearl.) Not that anyone takes the Bagel Times seriously any longer since it decided that whites are very bad people, and that it will cover ...
It has stepped into the pop culture spotlight via the HBO hit Succession, a hit job on the very rich and powerful produced by the very rich and much more powerful Adam McKay (The Big Short). McKay started off by doing a lot of cheesy comedies, made a large fortune, and then went after Wall Street types. Nothing wrong with that, films are supposed to go after the rich and powerful, and always have, but it’s the coverage of a ...
Around twenty years or so ago I had point for match point on a perfect grass court in Fort Belvedere. We’d been playing for close to two hours. I remember hitting a topspin backhand down the line and going to the net and seeing my ball just miss the tramline. I was perfectly positioned to call the ball out. My opponent, thinking I would approach with a crosscourt, was covering his backhand side. He called my ball in. “Ball ...
Do any of you remember the time when everything took place on terraces and outdoor cafés? Before everyone retreated into laptops and mobile telephones and Twitter? When possibilities flickered through the streets and the potential of new encounters was everywhere? Well, that’s all gone now, thanks to some pretty ugly-looking fellows with names like Dorsey and Zuckerberg, but we’re the ones who adopted their useless ...
Nice to be back in London, and Glebe Place is a delight. Mind you, it’s not the mansion I was expecting, just a very nice mews house on a very quiet part of the street away from the King’s Road. The noise of the city gets on my nerves, which means I’ve lived on an island and among cows for too long. Alexandra seems to like London more than I do nowadays, and that’s a switch if there ever was one. Knightsbridge was home ...
