NEW YORK—It’s nice to finally be in the Bagel, a place where the cows have two legs and no bells around their necks. I walk daily around the park that lies two blocks away from my house and stick to the Upper East Side in general. The park is by far the best part of Manhattan, and it’s better than ever because of you-know-what. Yes, the virus has chased away the tourists, and without tourists the rickshaws that had turned ...

New York, New York, once a wonderful town The people are crap and the mayor’s a clown The only safe space is a hole in the ground... NEW YORK—I could go on, but why be so negative? Arriving from bucolic Switzerland, Newark feels like Katanga circa 1960. If this isn’t a third-world-country airport, I don’t know what is. Newark is known as the murder capital of America, but it’s not PC to mention it because Newark is ...

Juliette Gréco’s recent death in her 90s brought back some melodramatic memories. Back in 1957 Gréco was one of France’s premier chanteuses of torch songs, a very sexy young woman all dressed in black with auburn hair and very white skin, who sang of doomed love and romantic longing. Darryl F. Zanuck, the legendary ex-head of 20th Century Fox, had fallen rather hard when he saw her perform in a Parisian Left Bank bistro ...

GSTAAD—It is not exactly a stop all the clocks occasion, let alone cut off the telephones, but I’ve finally come to a decision: My looking-at-cows time is over. I am going to leave good old Helvetia and find something nice in the green and pleasant land I hear about sung in hymns in British churches. Easier said than done. The reason I want to move is that I’ve had it. For the first time in my life I’m bored with my ...

GSTAAD—I’ve been wrestling all week with indecision, the kind that tests one’s soul, and the uncertainty is killing me. It’s like having to choose between Keira Knightley and Jennifer Lawrence, when it’s normal to want both. No, I’m not being greedy, and it’s not even my fault, but that of my esteemed colleague Douglas Murray, author of The Madness of Crowds and a fellow columnist at The Spectator. Two weeks ago, ...

Exactly fifty years ago last month I was lolling by the pool of the St. Georges Hotel in Beirut surrounded by bikini-clad women of uncertain virtue, spooks, pimps, journalists, and rotund Lebanese playboys who gave a bad name to the genre. The scene was straight out of the movie Casablanca, except we all wore swimming trunks and there was no Rick to run the show. I was waiting for two Paris Match journalists who had a car to ...

GSTAAD—I’m not usually nonplussed, but this is very strange: The memoirs of Barbara Black, the wife of my good friend Lord Black, simply do not make sense where certain people she writes about are concerned, persons whom I happen to know well. The list is not long, and I’ll start with David Graham, her third and extremely rich husband, who was the biggest bore I have ever met, and believe you me, I’ve met a few in my ...

GSTAAD—It snowed during the last two days of August up here, and why not? We’ve traded freedom of speech for “freedom from speech,” so on an upside-down planet, snow in the Alps in August is the new normal. The world is suddenly a grim place, a sick prank when you think of it, a kamikaze fantasy with the bad guys winning and being cheered on by the left and the media. The virus is now a metaphor, religion having been ...

GSTAAD—I experienced my first Zoom conference last week, and didn’t think much of it. As the great Yogi Berra once remarked, “You can observe a lot just by watching,” but in my case I observed very little and heard quite a lot. I suppose one day in the future every meeting will be Zoom-style, but I bet my bottom dollar they’ll never be as preposterous as was the annual Pugs Club get-together. As everyone knows, Pugs ...

GSTAAD—The jokes about keeping a mistress are old and I’ve yet to hear a truly funny one: “The difference between a wife and a mistress is like day and night,” “She’s been kept so often she was recently declared a playground area,” and so on. Like many other very good things, mistresses have gone out of style, what with equality between the sexes where salaries are concerned being one of the main reasons for their ...

GSTAAD—Birthdays at my age are for the birds, but always a good excuse for a party. Messages of good wishes began early on, with loyal Speccie reader Arnold Taylor ringing from South Africa, and Rosemary and Wafic Said texting from the English countryside. (They wished me a happy 39th. I accepted.) My great buddy Michael Mailer, staying with the Kennedys at the family compound in Hyannis Port, had hoped to fly over but the ...

I write this under an Attic sun reflecting from the marbles of the Acropolis and into my living room. This was once the center of Western civilization, its stem just hundreds of feet from where I’m standing. Individual liberty and democracy first flourished right here, when 300 Spartans gladly went to their inevitable death against as many as 100,000 Persians in order to preserve free thought. Because of their sacrifice and ...

SERIFOS—There’s no high life here, only family life, so I’ve been hitting the books about great Greeks of the past, and they sure make today’s bunch look puny. Philosophers, playwrights, statesmen, artists, poets, orators, sculptors—the ancients had them all. In 2,500 years they’ve never been equaled. I was once at the New York Met walking around the Greek wing and I ran into Henry Kissinger, whom I knew slightly. ...

ISLAND OF SERIFOS—Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: Island life is not for me. Island life off a boat, jawohl, but island life without a boat, nyet! Family czars insisted that living in tight quarters with COVID-ignoring sex-starved sailors would not be conducive to the health of my four grandchildren, who range from 2 months to 14 years. Better safe than sorry and all that, but from now on, COVID-carrying and ...

ATHENS—This ancient city without tourists reminds me of the Athens I once knew and loved, but for the hideous ’60s modern buildings that defaced its beauty like plastic surgery gone wrong. Walking around the winter royal palace and the national gardens, I point out some old beauties to the wife on Herod Atticus and King George II streets. The chic addresses are of friends, now mostly gone forever, and I include number 13 ...

The lockdown and its enforced boredom have been replaced by a consistent feeling of loss, my nephew by marriage Hansie Schoenburg, age 33, from a brain tumor, and my close friend Shariar Bachtiar, 72, most likely by his own hand. Hansie was tall, blond, a Yale grad, and extremely handsome. Recently married, he died surrounded by his family. Shariar was the Persian Boy, who as a slender, bright-eyed 6-year-old who spoke not a ...