Rose-colored glasses conceded, the ’50s were still the best decade ever. Uncle Sam was propping up recovering Europe, our borders were not being overrun, the French Riviera was not covered by cement and inhabited by oligarchs and oil-rich camel drivers, tennis players played for love, and Mickey Mantle hit balls way out of the park without the aid of steroids. And pro football had suddenly caught on. The pros ran onto the ...

Is there anything not to like about Christmas? The answer is a resounding NO, and I include the secular sham that goes with it, expensive trees and cheap pink paper and maddening shopping. The birth of our Lord Jesus came in handy on his 1914th birthday, when the German and British troops called a halt to the slaughter and played football instead. (The high command should have followed the troops’ example, but they ordered ...

Like the song almost says, what a difference a year makes: 2017 is not over yet, but it’s been a lousy one so far. For starters, losing two very close friends was a real bummer, then the Brexit negotiations and the Trump presidency revealed that I declared victory too soon. Last year at this time I was singing about what a great year it’s been, what a great mood I’m in, and so on. The British people had decided they no ...

If you thought comedy was dead, take a look at the newest Napoleon on the block, the one wearing sandals and a tablecloth on his head and striking a heroic pose with his hairy legs wrapped around a camel’s hump. This ludicrous figure resides in Riyadh and is fawned upon by people like Prince Charles and our 45th president, not to mention those with greased palms in Washington who are busy spreading the word that Saudi Arabia ...

There’s fear and loathing in this town, and in El Lay it’s even worse. Torquemada and Savonarola are in charge, and if this is not a new edition of the Spanish Inquisition, I don’t know what is. The enemy is “toxic masculinity,” as exhibited by the latest to lose his job forever, Charlie Rose, not a bad guy but a bleeding-heart liberal who acted like Benito in front of fair maidens. Or so they claim. In the meantime, ...

Two rather splendid dinners given in the Bagel by George Livanos and Mick Flick, where the subject of the faux Leonardo that sold for 400 million greenbacks—plus a $50 million fee for Christie’s—was a subject dissected again and again during the glitterati’s chitchat. Mind you, my fellow guests were not the types to be outraged or shocked at the obscenity of the moola involved, but it beat talking about the weather or ...

What news can one report from the Home of the Depraved after the church shooting in Texas, one that included babies and children and eight members of one praying family? It is almost too hard to fathom. I’ve been here six weeks and three mass-murder sprees have taken place, two by deranged male shooters, the other by an Allah disciple from Uzbekistan who unfortunately survived a cop’s bullet and demanded an ISIS flag be ...

A dinner by Michael Mailer in honor of Arki Busson in Michael’s brilliant Brooklyn flat on the banks of the East River, overlooking the Statue of Liberty a quarter mile away. His father Norman had some very brainy people living it up on these premises, and Michael has continued the custom of feeding pretty women, bitchy columnists, talented cinematographers, and brainy tycoons like Arki, among the few tycoons I know who ...

I have a message for the London mayor, Sadiq Khan: You and your policies stink! While the fuzz is busy trolling the internet for racist or sexist material, crime in the capital is up 10 percent, and the police—handicapped by PC orders from above—have made fewer arrests by 12 percent. Youth violence and murder are soaring in London, and some statistics have them up by 84 percent. Here’s a story that’s not a statistic: ...

I hate to say this, but the quality of life in the Bagel has crashed in a Harvey Weinstein-like downfall. The city has always had a sort of roller-coaster feel, its ups and downs following Wall Street and budget cuts, but the present state is by far the worst I’ve ever experienced. When I first came to New York it was the true center of the world. It was following the war, Europe was in ruins, and what glamour existed ...

The only woman who has not been sexually harassed and possibly raped by Harvey Weinstein is Mata Hari, and that’s because she was executed by the brave French a hundred years ago this month for spying. She was not a German spy and she blew kisses to the firing squad that shot her full of holes. Otherwise, I may have spoken too soon last week when defending Weinstein. It now looks very bad for him, with even Hillary Clinton ...

This is very strange. I left the old continent a disunited mess, with African immigrants overrunning the place and an unelected and unaccountable bureaucratic elite using the media to inform the peasants that everything is hunky-dory. I arrived in the good old US of A and was informed by the media that the country was falling apart, that it was one step away from total disaster, but saw firsthand that not only was it not, but ...

I smell a rat when it comes to Harvey Weinstein. Let’s take it from the start. The telephone rang very early in the morning and a woman’s voice told me that Harvey Weinstein wanted to speak to me. I was put on hold and I waited. And waited, and then waited some more. The reason I didn’t hang up was because I wanted to tell Harvey that if Queen Elizabeth had made me wait as long as he did I would have hung up. “But for ...

The death of the richest woman on the planet, as the tabloids dubbed Liliane Bettencourt, brought back some vivid memories, mainly of the gigolos I’ve known and their disgraceful pursuit of the fairer sex for the root of all envy. Ironically, my great friend Porfirio Rubirosa acted the gigolo at times—he married three of the world’s richest women, and two of the most beautiful for love—but he was also a man’s man, a ...

Instead of getting life without parole in one of those white isolation cells in the toughest of jails for aiding and abetting terrorism, he is feted the world over and is America’s third-richest man, after Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Step forward, Jeff Bezos, third-richest with 87 billion big ones but numero uno when it comes to physical ugliness. I will get to ugly Jeff in a moment, but first I have to declare an ...

I think this week marks my fortieth anniversary as a Spectator columnist, but I’m not 100 percent certain. All I know is that I was 39 or 40 years old when the column began, and that I’ve just had my 81st birthday. Keeping a record is not my strong point, and it’s also a double-edged knife. I once planned to publish my diary, but then I stopped keeping one. I found passages in it that were in a way dishonest, written in ...