The following was recently but ecstatically pronounced by the malignant, anti-white, anti-Christian, and anti-male New York Times: “Perhaps for the first time since the United States was established, a majority of young adults here do not identify as Christian.” Yes, you read this right, the Sulzberger gang who owns the paper and adheres to the Jewish faith celebrates this sorry state of affairs with a bold headline in its ...
NEW YORK—Things are heating up, in both London and Nueva York, as this place should correctly be called. Two flunkies writing in the N.Y. Times announced to the fools that read the most anti-white and anti-male newspaper on record that Boris is committing gaffes and could, like Trump, be a dead man walking. It’s wishful thinking and the premature celebration confirms that the media can no longer be trusted, certainly not ...
At the time it felt like a century, but it was only twelve years. I began this column in 1977 and the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the latter calling for an end to my anti-communist tracts that my first editor, Alexander Chancellor, described as quasi-fascist efforts to subvert democracy. By 1977 I had been trying for a couple of years to get something published in the Speccie, and only achieved it when I abandoned right-wing ...
NEW YORK—What follows will bore the pants off you, but at least it beats another piece on Brexit. Perhaps some of you are interested in old Bagel buildings, as I am, but if Boris doesn’t make a deal with Nigel and the vote is split, I will make sure to blow up the houses of those responsible for easing an old Marxist fool into 10 Downing. Boris, I love you, but please call Nigel. So here goes about buildings that are not ...
A busy ten days—nights, rather—with some heroic drinking thrown in for good measure. Hangovers discriminate against the old nowadays, but no one is doing anything about it, not in Washington, not in New York, not in London. The old chairman of The Spectator, Algy Cluff, had a dinner party at a gentlemen’s club, featuring an extremely funny speech by him, which started me off boozing—and it didn’t let up. One drinks to ...
Should art mirror the world as it is, or does an artist fail the public if the work goes back in time, before the grotesqueries of the present? Back, back, I say, but that’s to be expected. I’m such a fan of the past that if I could have one wish granted by Takimag, it would be for a review by William Dalrymple of the most uplifting movie ever, Ladies in Black, directed by the great Australian Bruce Beresford. My, my, what ...
NEW YORK—A strange thing happened to me last week here in the Bagel. Having read the review of Susan Sontag’s biography in The Spectator’s pages, my plan was to compare hers with that of Simone de Beauvoir—an opus about Paris, Simone, and the Left Bank après la guerre that I had just finished. My money was on Simone, an extremely promiscuous and beautiful woman who was the first to raise the feminine flag against ...
NEW YORK—The Roy Cohn documentary Bully, Coward, Victim was successfully screened last week at Lincoln Center to a full house, then turned into a pro-Rosenberg, anti-Trump manifestation. Had I known this, I would not have taken part in it, but what is a poor little Greek boy trying to make it in the movies to do? Do it, said Michael Mailer, and I followed orders like a good German soldier remaining in Stalingrad. Here’s ...
It’s Indian summertime and the living is easy. There hasn’t been a cloud above the Bagel for two weeks, the temperature is perfect, the noise of cement mixers and construction everywhere is unbearable, and there is gridlock while the world’s greatest freeloaders are in town for the U.N. annual. Despite the great weather, the place feels joyless, the media full of dire warnings about safe spaces and racism. There’s ...
NEW YORK—The master of the love letter to New York, E.B. White, eloquently described the city as a place that “can offer the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” Like many of us he believed the place would last and would always matter. White was an optimist, sophisticated and thoroughly American. He was lucky to die in 1985. I say lucky because fate spared him from seeing the wreckage of what was once his dream ...
Ten years or so ago Stephen Fry, an English polymath, stage and screen actor, writer, TV personality, and many other things, gave a Spectator-sponsored lecture at the prestigious Royal Geographical Society. The theme was that he would live in America in a heartbeat. I know Stephen and paid extra attention to his speech because I’ve lived between his country and the U.S. for most of my adult life. His love affair with Uncle ...
About Jeffrey Epstein, who the day before my last birthday did the first good thing he had ever done in his life and topped himself: I never laid eyes on the SOB. Yet a hack recently informed me over the telephone that my address was found in his notebook. My address was easy to find. It was in the New York telephone book for years. Hacks exhibit a civil service mindset—doing it by the book—when it comes to powerful people, ...
He was a Falstaff in his drinking and in celebrating life, but his greatness lay in his friendships. Like his closest friend Nick Scott, who left us three years ago, he roamed the world making friends and being as generous to them as a fairy godfather. The years, with all their disappointments, teach us caution, but Tim Hoare remained reckless to the end. This is High Life about him fifteen years ago: “We hit a hurricane ...
Romy Somerset is the sweetest, nicest young girl in London. She’s also my goddaughter, and I remember during her christening at Badminton years ago the present duke’s mother staring at me rather intensely while the minister was going on about love, trust, and faithfulness. At lunch afterwards I asked Caroline Beaufort why the looks. “I was wondering if you recognized any of those words,” said a laughing duchess. Well, ...
GSTAAD—I was reading Julie Burchill’s review of my friend Candace Bushnell’s Is There Still Sex in the City? when one of the reviewer’s insights struck me like a stiff left jab to the noggin: “Those who have persisted in carrying on creakily have become increasingly embarrassing.” Ouch! Could she have the poor little Greek boy in mind? Of course not, I told myself, but then...never mind. A little paranoia at my age ...
Sailing in Homer’s wine-dark Aegean Sea is the best antidote I know to the brouhaha over the “Squad.” And traipsing all over the Acropolis and the marvels of antiquity makes these four publicity-seeking, opportunistic mental dwarfs seem even pettier than they are. Mind you, these petulant females wouldn’t know the difference between Corinthian and Doric any more than they’d know Athenian democracy as opposed to ...
