GSTAAD—When Gerald Murphy and Cole Porter discovered the French Riviera as a summer resort during the early ’20s, the swells and avant-gardes still spent the warm months in cool places like Deauville and Baden-Baden. I thought of the deserted summer Riviera and how marvelous the place must have been when people like Picasso and Hemingway joined forces with Cole and Gerald and launched the resort to end all resorts. No ...

I’ve spent most of the summer sailing around the Greek Isles and reading up on the Spartans. Why the Spartans? Well, both of my mother’s parents were Spartans, and their parents and grandparents also; in fact the line goes back a very long way. Our house in Sparta I visited 25 years ago, but it was closed, like many museums tend to be in Greece when the temperature rises. (Everyone heads for the beach.) I think it was my ...

GSTAAD—It seems to be open season on royals, starting with Prince Andrew and the charges against him by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a graduate of the Jeffrey Epstein finishing school. I’ve met Andrew a couple of times, but he wouldn’t know me from Adam. I’ve never met anyone who has had anything to do with Epstein except for Ghislaine Maxwell, who has problems of her own just now. Like everyone else, however, I have my ...

CORONIS—Embracing one’s vulnerability seems to have replaced the higher, faster, stronger emblem of the Olympics. The very frailty that makes us human seems to have won over the need to excel, or so the Games’ sponsors tell us. Not that I watched any of it. Not a single second, so help me you-know-who. I liked Sebastian Coe’s remark in last week’s Spectator about taking advice from Djokovic, who quit the mixed thus ...

PATMOS—A very long time ago I wrote right here that spending a summer on the Riviera or the Greek isles without a boat was as useless as a eunuch in a cathouse. That was then and this is now, alas. The French and Greek seas are the same, if a little bit more crowded, but the people with boats are very, very different. Back then one knew almost everyone worth knowing, that is everyone with a smart sailing boat, and a few with ...

GREECE—Two hundred years ago last March, the Greeks rose up against the hated Turks, who had occupied most of the mainland for 400 years, and with the help of Britain, France, and Russia drove the infidels back where they came from. The war ended with the London Protocol of 1830, which recognized the creation of the independent nation-state called Greece. Hellas, as we call her, became the first independent nation in the ...

GREECE—I’m in Patmos with four grandchildren, two children, and a wife. I know, I know, it sounds very lower-middle-class and is, only Bournemouth and some sun beds are missing, but who cares? Children have friends, and grandchildren even younger friends, so it’s not all gloom and doom. At dinner the other night up at the piazza, which holds about forty tables, there was not a single Philip Green type among the guests, ...

August is called the silly season by English hacks, as the Brits like to call journalists. Most people are on vacation; the days are lazy, sunny, and long; and “stop the presses” stories are rare and far between. Silly stories are awarded front-page coverage for lack of earth-shattering news items. I don’t use social media, hence I rely on good old-fashioned newspapers for keeping up with the news. I read Rupert ...

I write this as a follow-up to last week’s essay on muzzling after making whoopee. I’m on my way to an island so difficult to get to, it has kept the great unwashed away, and from now on it is the only island I will grace with my presence—until the next time, that is. It was Kipling who quipped about journalists having “power without responsibility.” He then added “the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ...

GSTAAD—After six and a half months apart, I had absolutely no trouble recognizing my wife. Out she came to the driveway to greet me as Charlie the horny driver brought a sleepy Greek boy home after a long flight from the Bagel. I pretended not to know her and embraced the maid instead, but it didn’t work. My son and two grandchildren added to the merriment as they played along when I asked them who was that lady who tried ...

Wimbledon is here at last, after the missing 2020 year. What struck me watching the French Open a couple of weeks before on TV was just how much rubbish I had to listen to if I kept the sound on. There are now too many matches broadcast, which means more and more commentators spouting off about the game in the middle of rallies. I don’t know what it is that makes viewers accept these nonstop blabbermouths who interrupt their ...

NEW YORK—I hope this is my last week in the Bagel. I plan to fly first to Switzerland and then on to London. There’s the annual Pugs’ Club lunch I cannot afford to miss, but now that Boris is married I don’t suppose he gives a damn about the poor little Greek boy and his club lunches. Incidentally, all my London friends tell me they’re partying like mad, but when I open the papers it’s all about lockdown. Somebody ...

NEW YORK—I haven’t felt such shirt-dripping, mind-clogging wet heat since Saigon back in 1971. The Bagel is a steam bath, with lots of very ugly people walking around in stages of undress that would have once upon a time embarrassed famed stripper Lili St. Cyr. How strange that very pretty girls do not shed their clothes as soon as the mercury hits triple figures, but less fortunate ones do even if the number is a cool 80. ...

NEW YORK—It’s party time in the Bagel, at least private party time, yours truly being an extra man nowadays as my wife and I have been separated by pandemic restrictions for six months. Alexandra is in London, quarantined after visiting two little blond things in Austria for my fourth grandchild Theodora’s first birthday. I am doing dinner parties nonstop in the Bagel as if I were a gay walker back in the ...

I remember being in the minority in school with my dark brown hair, the majority of kids having light brown or blond hair. Americans back then looked like a mixture of Anglo-Irish, German, and Scandinavian, as opposed to now, where the Bagel looks like downtown Caracas, better yet, Karachi. Nothing wrong with that, I guess, but real blondes seem to have disappeared, replaced by peroxide ones where the weaker sex is concerned. ...

Back in 1967, during the Six-Day War, I was living in Paris, and such was my pro-Israel ardor, I actually went to some dump and put my name down as a volunteer in case the state of Israel ran out of soldiers. I was asked by the man in charge if I was Jewish, I answered in the negative, and he jumped up and shook my hand. As everyone knows, my services were not needed that June 54 years ago, and the war was over while I was ...