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The lockdown and its enforced boredom have been replaced by a consistent feeling of loss, my nephew by marriage Hansie Schoenburg, age 33, from a brain tumor, and my close friend Shariar Bachtiar, 72, most likely by his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 ...
GSTAAD—Are any of you tired of reading about Ghislaine Maxwell and her sleazy life? Bored with old news repeated ad nauseam by people who never had—and still don’t have—a clue? Well, your intrepid high-life correspondent does have a clue, so here goes. But before I go on about la Maxwell, a few thoughts about the drama taking place in Court 13 on the Strand, where I had the leading role in an 1986 drama—also starring ...
Apple pie, farms, local movie theaters, pickup baseball games, swimming holes, volunteer firemen, and small libraries with very old lady librarians: an America soon to be gone with the wind. I just read a piece by Scott McConnell in The American Conservative, a magazine we cofounded eighteen years ago, that mentions unfairness in the historical sense. He writes about the victims of communism being less commemorated than the ...
It has been said ad nauseam that when Uncle Sam sneezes, the English bulldog catches the flu. Emulating American rioting has caught on over here with a bang, pun intended, and it is one import, as Douglas Murray wrote in The Spectator, “that we can do without.” When Paris literally blew up back in 1968, and de Gaulle himself had to fly to Germany to ensure French troops stationed there would remain loyal, swinging London ...
GSTAAD—A friend of mine who lives here wants to start a literary festival and asked me if I had some advice for him. He’s a nice fellow and very friendly with my daughter, but he’s also the type that, had he been on board, would have thought the Titanic had stopped engines in order to take on some ice. In other words, he’s a naive man who believes in literature and writers and doesn’t realize that both commodities are ...
GSTAAD—I thought of Nietzsche while the mayhem and destruction of monuments were going on, and his dictum of strengthening the strong and paralyzing the weak as a means of producing a higher type. Decadent bourgeois society was in the great man’s sights, but then he went bananas. Later on, young Nietzscheans believed that what was needed to save the world was an insurrection of sons against their fathers. But things do ...
GSTAAD—Oh, to be in America, where cultural decay and self-destruction compete equally with hyperfeminist and anti-racist agendas. Gone With the Wind is suddenly as popular as Triumph of the Will is in Israel, and the great Robert E. Lee’s statue in Richmond is as likely to remain upright as a Ku Klux Klan rally in Harlem. I give the statue of my hero a week at the most. And over here poor old Winnie is also in the ...
VIENNA—Somebody once described Vienna as a top opera performed by understudies. The remark was unquestionably witty, but utterly false back when it was made. It is perfectly true for today, however. During the 650-year rule of the Habsburgs, Vienna reigned supreme, an opera sung by its greatest stars. It is the present Vienna, having lost its empire, its imperial family, and its power, that is sung by the understudies. I’ve ...
AUSTRIA—I finally understand what’s wrong with the modern world: motorways! These dehumanizing slabs of asphalt lining our continents are Prometheus-like chains luring us to nonstop movement and uniformity. But before you start screaming that you’ve been isolated for months and would give up a night with Jennifer Lawrence to roar down a highway, let me explain: It all began when Alexandra and I decided to visit my ...
Solitude is a blissful disengagement from the horrors of modern-day life, even if forced upon us by a government lockdown. The trouble with the present situation is the idiot box. The enforced solitude would be a blessing—it tends to breed spirituality—but for the escapism of television. The absolute rubbish, the vulgarity and violence that the networks put out nowadays and call entertainment, is far more dangerous than the ...
GSTAAD—Well, Theodora did not wait and I missed yet another grandchild’s birth. (The prettiest little blue-eyed thing ever, if I say so myself.) Funny thing is, I’ve never been able to be there when it counts. I missed my daughter’s birth because I was playing tennis in Palm Beach and got to the Bagel ten minutes too late. (She rarely forgets to mention it.) I missed my boy’s because I went back to sleep and Alexandra ...
