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 ...

As everyone who stands up when a lady enters the room knows, the once-sacrosanct civil rules throughout the West have all but disappeared. The deterioration of manners has accelerated with the coming of the devil’s device—the dehumanizing iPhone—and with phony “art” and artists such as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons. I don’t know why, but Warhol is a bugaboo of mine. He always treated me politely, featured me favorably ...

I’m in Venice for the film festival that just ended, and as an American humorist once wired his paper, “Streets full of water, stop. Send funds, stop.” What is there to say about Venice that hasn’t already been said or written by better men or women? (Thomas Mann and Jan Morris come to mind.) Yes, Venice evokes higher thoughts, but not this time. I was thinking of Byron as I chugged past the Palazzo Rezzonico where he ...

After the heat in Greece, the Alps are cool and green and very comfortable. My sensei Richard Amos is over here, and we squeezed two weeks of intensive karate training into three days. Nothing makes me feel better than the sense of total exhaustion after a hard day’s fight. We do “kihon” and “kata,” and then we let fly in “kumite.” Except that recently I’ve caught him diving, as they say in the ugly game. ...

I was appalled. She had asked Lord John Somerset to ask me to join her, and I rose rather unsteadily to do so. This was during a Jimmy Goldsmith ball, and I was writing the Atticus column in The Sunday Times, along with High Life in The Spectator. A German girlfriend of mine at the time warned me about going over. “If you go to her, that’s it,” she told me. “Auf Wiedersehen,” I answered. The princess signaled for me ...

Greece is a small beautiful country in the southeastern part of Europe, a place of jasmine, bougainvillea, mimosa, cypresses, olive trees, pines, oregano, sage, and thyme; sand, rock, and the bluest and cleanest water on earth. It was the birthplace of (selective) democracy, philosophy, Attic tragedy, poetry, history, and, of course, tyranny. The most beautiful and symmetrical edifice ever constructed still stands in the sacred ...

When the Germans smuggled arguably the world’s most evil man into Russia 100 years ago, they did not imagine the harm they were springing on the human race. Once Lenin had prevailed, he decided to forge a new consciousness, a New Man, as the Bolshies called it, one that would overcome “the antinomies of subjective and objective, body and spirit, family and party.” Leave it to a horror like Lenin to design a new human ...

One of my many regrets is that when I was young and on the tennis circuit, I played as a man. I had a crush on Margaret Osborne duPont, an older player who won numerous Wimbledon and U.S. national doubles titles, and the very pretty Karen Hantz, a Wimbledon singles winner, not to mention the Buding sisters from Germany. Had I thought of it back then—I am talking about the late ’50s—I could have been showering with them, ...

As Jacob Rees-Mogg said in a different context, a happy birthday at my age is a terminological inexactitude. I needed the birthday I had last week like a hole in the head, to coin a brand-new expression. Mind you, the miasma of misinformation that deals with maturity never fails to depress. The ancient Greeks did respect old age, but they got old in their late 20s. An 80-year-old in old Athens would be a 250-year-old in ...