NEW YORK—With the Karamazovian hangover now only a weekly occurrence, the healthy life rules supreme. Well, most of the time. Up early, I go for a brisk thirty-minute walk before breakfast in the park that stretches out two blocks away. I finish off with two sets of twenty push-ups on a park bench, a few kicks and punches against leaves as targets, then cross Fifth Avenue going east. (Karate is now a three-night-per-week ...
NEW YORK—What follows has been covered ad nauseam, but I wonder why people were surprised at the planned football breakaway Super League. Professional sports in Europe now follow the American way, which means money comes before tradition, hometown loyalty, and lastly the fans, the schmucks who live and die for their teams. The bottom line in American sports is what it’s all about, and European football has a lot to learn ...
Writing in the London Spectator quite a long time ago—I’ve been a columnist there since 1977—I listed some great Americans, among them General Robert E. Lee, Charles Lindbergh, and Ernest Hemingway. Needless to say, if one were to mention some of these names today in an American publication, or dare bring them up on a news program, all hell would break loose and the writer would instantly become a nonperson. The ...
NEW YORK—The high life has gone with the wind due to you-know-what—the last time I went to a glittering ball Marie Antoinette still had a head on her shoulders, or so it seems—while sweats and leggings are now ubiquitous during intimate dinner parties. Here in the Bagel, fashion has followed the street for a long time, making high fashion seem as irrelevant and obscene as Anna Wintour being paid millions to kiss the asses ...
NEW YORK CITY—Ha, ha! What London turned down, the Bagel accepted with alacrity, namely the poor little Greek boy. And it took ten minutes max after disembarking to go through customs and collect my luggage. Kennedy had less people than a gay wedding in Saudi, and then some. Mind you, the Upper East Side where I live is also quiet as a grave, the only sound the occasional ambulance siren racing for a tea break. Central Park, ...
It takes a very good writer to produce prose that prompts emotions a reader has experienced in an unconnected past. It also takes a good writer to subtly tip off the reader of the change in the character of the American people, one in which toughness has been replaced by weakness. Talleyrand once remarked that no one who had been born after the French Revolution could know how sweet life could be. Larry McMurtry wrote about ...
CHELSEA, LONDON, U.K.—Oh, to be in England, but let’s start at the beginning. I challenge any reader to claim they are more technologically disadvantaged than yours truly, or anyone not suffering from Alzheimer’s in fact. I resisted getting a mobile telephone until my days on board a sailing boat became a nightmare. I missed get-togethers and lost friends, and finally gave in around ten years ago. More trouble followed. ...
This is for you writers out there: If you’re not canceled, you’re no good. The good Dr. Seuss is out, as is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, but Adolf Hitler is still in, although I can’t say the same for William Shakespeare. Everyone who’s anyone is getting canceled, so I was glad to see Captain Cook also gone, because BLM said so for his “invasion” of Australia. Never mind that Cook discovered that beautiful ...
GSTAAD—I have not experienced such a long, continuous blizzard ever, and I’ve been coming here for 63 years. The ski lifts are closed, as are the hotels, and it’s been dumping for a week nonstop. My Portuguese handyman Fernando now lives on his snow plow, clearing the private road that leads to the house, as useless a task as trying to bail out the Titanic. By now I should be in London, enjoying my new rented house in ...
GSTAAD—Some of you may have noticed I have not commented at all about the running soap opera and latest brouhaha concerning the Halfwit and Meghan Macbeth. That’s because I decided long ago the best way to counter their publicity machine is to never mention them. But I’ve also done something most of the hacks writing about the couple have not: I’ve been a guest on Oprah’s show twice, once by my little old self for a ...
It is the sine qua non of a successful coup to first and foremost ensure the takeover of the means of information: radio, television, and newspapers. That is what the Greek colonels did in the last successful European coup back on April 21, 1967. Some years later, a colonel tried to overthrow the elected post-Franco Spanish government but failed, having taken over the Parliament rather than the TV and radio station. This, of ...
GSTAAD—I was very sad to read of Rupert Hambro’s death. I didn’t know him well, but first met him long ago, along with his younger brother Rick, also gone, both quintessential English gentlemen, handsome, kind, and with a great sense of humor. Rupert invited me to lunch quite a few times, but because of circumstance I was never able to reciprocate. The last one was at Wilton’s, which he owned, I believe, but he never ...
GSTAAD—That’s all we needed in a great year, for The Great Gatsby’s copyright to expire. Some Fitzgerald wannabe has already cashed in with a prequel, and I’m certain the worst is yet to come. I suppose the insatiable hunger for fame and celebrity in order to impress a shallow and scatterbrained blonde across the water made Gatsby a very tragic hero, but not as tragic as Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, who had his ...
GSTAAD—The sun has returned, the snow is so-so, and exercise has replaced everything, including romance. What a way to go, after a wasted year that did wonders for my health, the diet is about to kill the patient. This is the good-bad news, the really great news is that Shakespeare has been canceled by some woke American female teachers because they think his classic works promote “misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, ...
GSTAAD—Good old Helvetia, I’m quitting her for the rainy but pleasant land of England, the cows beginning to resemble chorus girls and the village an alpine Colditz. Too much of a good thing, said a wise man to a friend of mine who wanted to live on the French Riviera year-round. That was long ago. The South of France is now what Trump described some Central American countries as, a “shithole,” and a very expensive one ...
GSTAAD—During these dark endless moments of lockdown, let’s take a trip down memory lane of real high life, of parties galore, of carefree times with girls in their summer dresses, and of drunken dawns playing polo in dinner jackets. Creatures began to move properly about 500 million years ago, but I will only take you back some fifty or so years, when chic creatures moved to the beat of the samba, the tango, the waltz, and ...
