I remember it well. My friend and neighbor Baron Lambert had my wife and me to dinner at his Gstaad chalet, and the talk turned to Belgian history. Philippe Lambert’s grandfather, a banker, had lent money to King Leopold of the Belgians in order for the monarch to buy some real estate in Africa. He bought the Congo, made Philippe’s grandfather a baron, and paid back the debt in full. Talking about kings, I brought up the ...

Bellamy’s and Oswald’s are the two best restaurants in London. Owned by two friends of mine, both gents, both English, the service and the food are as good as it gets, and it don’t get better, as they say in Chicago. Last Friday I got off the plane and went straight to Bellamy’s, where Gavin Rankin, the owner; Tim Hanbury, voted annually father and husband of the year since 1980; and Charles Glass, left-wing author and ...

A lady once offered to go to bed with me if I could ensure her landing The Spectator’s diary. This was some time ago, but what I clearly recall is that I didn’t even try. To help her get the diary, that is. I don’t wish to start any guessing games among the beautiful “gels” that put out the world’s best weekly, but to my surprise that particular lady did get her wish sometime after, through no help from yours truly. ...

They were putting the finishing touches on the giant tent as I drove up to the Schloss Wolfsegg after an hour’s plane ride from Gstaad to a tiny nearby airport. With me were my son and two good friends, and the Pilatus felt like a Messerschmitt 109 cutting through the clouds and landing on a dime. Pilatus is a great airplane. It can cruise for seven hours at 280 knots, and land at less than 500 meters. It seats six people ...

I didn’t like it, and then I liked it. But a writer’s job is to tell the truth, as Papa said back in 1942. Hemingway maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing—“it takes away whatever butterflies have on their wings”—but he wrote nonstop about writing, as incisively about the subject as any writer ever did. Last week I finished my umpteenth book on Papa, and it depressed me to no end. Really. And then, ...

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 ...