Goody, goody gumdrops! The Donald has pardoned Lord Black and I couldn’t be happier. Conrad got a bum deal and spent three and a half years behind bars for charges I always believed to be phony, most of which were overturned. Never mind. One cannot get back the years wasted in a cell for as good a mind as Conrad’s, but one does emerge stronger from the pokey. (Throwing writer David Irving in jail in Austria was also a sham, ...
This is my last week in the Bagel and I’m going to give it the old college try. Two weeks without booze, ciggies, or ladies have made Taki a very dull boy. The next seven days—nights, rather—will decide. The Bagel, of course, is not what it used to be, but then what is? I was recently looking at some grand Gotham landmarks, contemplating that they or I will not be around forever. I walked inside the San Remo on the ...
Here’s a question for you: If your wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, even toy boy lied repeatedly to you about a serious matter such as fidelity, would you continue to trust them? I suppose some fools would, but normally not. So here’s another question: How can the British people even countenance voting for those they entrusted with their 2016 decision to leave the bureaucratic dictatorship that is the E.U.? Duh! ...
Charlottesville is an enchanting Virginia college town graced by the neoclassical architecture of the university’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. I flew there with two friends, the talented photographer Jonathan Becker and the Vietnam Special Forces Silver Star winner Chuck Pfeifer, all of us close buddies of the deceased. It was the memorial service for Willy von Raab, scourge of drug dealers and illegal immigrants while ...
Woke is the concept that everything must be inclusive and inoffensive. Oh dear! Being hyperaware of everyone’s sensitivities must make one a hell of a bore. I recently flew down to Charlottesville, Virginia, where I had gone to university, to speak at a memorial service for my friend Willy von Raab. The other speaker was P.J. O’Rourke, and in front of a packed congregation P.J. and I managed to not exactly be woke time and ...
NEW YORK—David Niven’s younger son Jamie, now an old man like yours truly and a bit overweight, approached my table and announced he had seen a video of me lunching elsewhere with two friends. He said this in front of two ladies I was with, one of whom has in the past raised issues, namely the wife. Luckily the video showed me with the designer Carolina Herrera and her husband, who are social friends, so after a pregnant ...
NEW YORK—On April 21, 1980, Rosie Ruiz won the fabled Boston Marathon in record time and looked fresh as a daisy when the media descended on her following her crowning with a wreath à la Ancient Greece. Rosie answered all the questions. She loved running, this was only her second marathon, and no, she was never tired or doubtful of victory during the two hours and 32 minutes of the race. The newspapers and the hacks went ...
Okay, sports fans, get your wallets out and start giving. That’s the latest brainstorm from a New York Times columnist who makes however unconvincing a case for reparations to black people. For slavery, that is. And that means you, whitey—or brownie, and I guess that goes for yellow ones also. He wants these reparations to be legislated into law, and everyone except African-Americans has to pay. His idea is hardly original. ...
Okay, chaps, keep your hands where people can see them, and don’t touch. And try not to look. Soon that too will be a crime, so keep your eyes on the ground and you’ll be fine. The other thing to stay away from is due process. It does not exist and don’t try to exploit it. It’s a male invention intended to shield men. Put this in your thick skull: You are presumed guilty when the accuser is female, especially an ...
I first met the man whose opioid products have supposedly killed 200,000 Americans 51 years ago, at the Hotel du Cap-d’Antibes. Mortimer Sackler looked old even back then, had a Noo Yawk accent, and without ever having been introduced approached me after a tennis match I had just lost with some unsolicited advice: “You need to calm down, take a tranquilizer,” or words to that effect. (I had been feuding throughout the ...
NEW YORK—This place feels funny, a bit like Beirut, where Christians, Muslims, Druze, and encamped Palestinians live together but separately, with one or two million Syrian refugees completing the mix. Over here the once-ruling WASPs are dead and buried, having moved to their country clubs in the suburbs and irrelevance. The Jews are in like Flynn, ruling Wall Street, the real estate market, and the television networks. The ...
NEW YORK CITY—Goodbye, snowcapped peaks; hello, swampy brown East River. So long, fresh alpine air; greetings, choking diesel fumes. Adios, cows and cuckoo clocks; welcome, filthy island packed to the gills with angry, mean, squat Trump haters who live in decrepit buildings they share with rats. Yes, back to the city that never sleeps, and whose residents are perennially offended. This is the bad news, the good being that ...
As Emperor Maximilian told his convulsed-by-tears servants while he was about to be executed by the Mexicans, “Who knew?” Last week the owner of the Palace hotel in Gstaad rang me and asked me to join him for a drink with Akira Kitade, a well-known Japanese author, best known for Visas of Life and the Epic Journey, concerning the Jewish Sugihara survivors reaching Japan and safety. Like most of his countrymen and -women, ...
As everyone knows, the definition of serendipity is searching for a needle in a haystack, and instead finding a farmer’s daughter. Not so fast, as they say. I live among farmers and haystacks up here in the Alps, and I’ve yet to run into a farmer’s daughter who is worth the buckshot in the bottom. I was thinking of such matters all last week while skiing with my son and his two children, and how happy I feel now, ...
A rare British species, a womanizing ex–foreign minister, kissed and told about his brief affair with a yellow-eyed temptress last week, and it brought back memories of a similar tryst by yours truly. Boris Johnson reclined on a bed of straw with a purring cheetah and lived to write about it without injury, although I am certain there were plenty of Brussels sprouts hoping for a different ending to the affair. Never mind. ...
Hold the presses! More Germans trust Vladimir Putin’s Russia than Trump’s United States. This is earth-shattering news, a scoop like no other. If this were 1969 the moon landing would be a smaller headline. And guess who came up with the scoop: none other than The New York Times, the paper that first told us that there was no famine in the Soviet Union back in the 1930s. (Five million Ukrainians died, but the writer of the ...
