I’m sitting in my office room and the place is still. The rest of the house is dark. Everyone’s out and I’m here writing about the death of a friend. I haven’t felt such gloom since my father died 28 years ago. The question of Why did he have to die? is implicitly followed by that of How did he live his life? The answer to that is easy: recklessly. Learning how to die, according to Montaigne, is unlearning how to be a ...

Twenty-five years ago this week, Los Angeles was burning because of Rodney King’s beating by the fuzz and I had my shoulder sliced open by a doctor in order to repair torn ligaments. My shoulder hurt more than Rodney’s ribs, because I saw him on TV get up and gesticulate freely after being whacked rather hard by four cops. I didn’t lift my arm for months. Lesson to be learned: Better to have four cops beat you than to run ...

If any more proof were needed that Brexit is the best thing to happen to Britain since 1066 and all that, here it is: Geologists have at last assembled a picture of the forces that tore a 10 million-year-old land bridge away and turned Britain into an island, rather than a peninsula of Europe like Denmark and Scandinavia. Yippee! It was God himself who ordered it. The bridge ran from Dover to Calais and deep into Cheeseland, ...

If the Clintons were not as down-market as they are, they would have fit in perfectly in 15th-century Florence, the city that gave us Botticelli and Cellini, and also the Medici, the Borgia, and, of course, Machiavelli. Renaissance Florence was not confined to painting and literature; quite the opposite, in fact. Doublespeak, or lying, was as prevalent in the city as art and making money, and the greatest exponent of lying was ...

NEW YORK—Things that I once loved (Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, brownstone terraces on hot summer afternoons, cold beer and fried eggs on 59th and 5th at 5 a.m. after a night of carousing, the Sherry-Netherland) and miss today have grown ever more monumental upon reflection. I suppose it’s normal, missing things you loved when you were young, yet I still can’t get over how the people have changed; for the worse, needless ...

I’d gladly exchange waistlines with him if he’d teach me to cut a phrase the way he does—in print, that is. I’m talking about none other than The Spectator’s “Brute” Anderson, whose style of writing I particularly admire but find impossible to emulate. But I have an excuse: English is my third language, acquired at age 12, after Greek and German. Never mind. A couple of weeks ago the Brute mentioned Pamela ...

My last week in the Alps, with the snow gone, replaced by brilliant sunshine, and the silence broken by the occasional clear, sharp wind. The town is now empty and clean, and the air bracing. I love the village out of season, the shoppers finally gone, the locals preparing to free the cows to get out and up the mountains. Training at altitude will make it easier to go hard once I’m back in the city, at least for a week or ...

William F. Buckley spent his adult winter months in Rougemont, an alpine resort next to its chicer neighbor Gstaad, now a mecca for the nouveaux riches and vulgar. Throughout the "€™60s and "€™70s, however, the area was known for its music festival run by Yehudi Menuhin, and for celebrity writers like Bill Buckley, my mentor, and others such as John Kenneth Galbraith and actor-turned-author David Niven. The Buckley ...

A cloudless sky. Crunchy spring snow. Longer, warmer days—I finally got in some good skiing, twisting around moguls like an arthritic champ. It’s all in the mind, as my old wrestling coach would tell me: If you think the other guy’s better, you’re bound to lose to him. The same goes for the slope. If it scares you, stay in the club and have another drink. Otherwise, attack it with gusto and feel like a champ again. The ...

At a chic dinner party last week, a friendly chow—as big and black as a dog can be without being a bear—sniffed a lady’s bum during a predinner drink. I happened to be standing behind the lady, and she raised her hand in anger. “It’s Bessie the dog,” I stammered. “What is wrong with you? I don’t do that anymore.” The lady in question is of a certain age, and the last one at the party I’d goose, but such are ...

A lousy fortnight if ever there was one. Two great friends, Lord Belhaven and Stenton and Aleko Goulandris, had their 90th-birthday celebrations, and I missed both shindigs because of this damn bug. Lord Belhaven’s was in London, at the Polish Club, but flying there was verboten. Robin Belhaven is an old Etonian, served as an officer in Northern Ireland, farmed in Scotland, has four children, eight grandchildren, and one ...

Who was it who said that behind every great fortune lies a great crime? The answer is a Frenchman by the name of Balzac, known as a pretty good novelist in his time. Well, is stealing an idea and making untold billions as a result a great crime? I suppose if it were my idea and some ghastly nerd from New Jersey whom I had hired to apply it had stolen it, I"€™d classify it as such, but I would also make sure he never walked ...

GSTAAD—Back in the good old days a funicular used to take skiers up, bucking all the way and at times stopping when the snowdrifts got too deep across the track. We used to wax our skis at every opportunity, deposit them in the baggage car, and ride the outdoor car. Most of us had a flask with good stuff in it, and once on top we’d push our laced-up boots into the toe irons and clamp them shut. We’d then wrap the long ...

From my chalet high up above the village, I look up at the immense mountain range of the glistening Alps and my spirit soars. Even youthful memories receding into sepia cannot bring me down from the high. Mountains, more than the sea, can be exhilarating for the soul. Then I open the newspapers and the downer is as swift as an alpine blizzard. Television is even more of a bummer. Last week I saw Piers Morgan tell an American TV ...

GSTAAD—One’s unpopularity for calling it a night diminishes in direct proportion to the severity of the next morning’s hangover. I was literally booed by Geoffrey Moore & Co. for asking the wife of a friend to drive me 200 yards to my chalet. Co., not Geoffrey, had other plans for the lady, and I will let you, the readers, take two guesses what those plans were. It was 5.30 a.m., the friend’s wife did look awfully ...

I write this from a small village high up in the Swiss Alps, where I have just left the tiny police station with a warning: Arab women are permitted in the Swiss-German part of the country to totally cover their face and body. The Italian part of Switzerland has forbidden it, but I was unaware that the German part had done a Merkel and allowed the full burka, hence I had demanded some Arab women to take them off. An eagle-eyed ...