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 ...

Greece is jasmine, bougainvillea, mimosa, cypresses, olive trees, pines, oregano, and sage; rock, sand, wine, fruit, and the bluest and cleanest water in the Med. The Peloponnese has the nicest, most welcoming, most generous of people, none more than my host and hostess at their private island, literally a paradise on earth. Around sixty staff keep the place ticking perfectly, and one thing I’ve learned in this long life of ...

I’ve stayed far away from the new barbarians with their choppers, tanklike cars, home theaters on board, and fridge-shaped superyachts that terrorize sea life. In fact, dolphins escorted us into Kyparissi, a tiny village on the eastern Peloponnese sixty kilometers from Sparta, my grandmother’s birthplace. German and Spartan, not a bad combination, especially if one thinks democracy is a biological contradiction, which I do. ...

I am surfing along the Cycladic islands on a 125-foot classic that was launched in 1929 by John Alden and has remained among the most beautiful sailing boats ever: Puritan. Everything on board is original, including the MoMC, my two grandchildren, and my son. I boarded her at Porto Heli, where the granddaughter of Aleko Goulandris was married last week in a two-night bash I shall not soon forget. It was a mixture of young and ...

I switch personalities at Spectator parties, depending on who the guests are: For our readers’ tea party, I am a warm and gracious semi-host, swigging scotch but graciously answering questions about my drinking, love life, and writing habits. For our summer Speccie spree, I turn into a tight-lipped, street-smart tough guy, conscious of my brave obscurity but determined not to give in to the Rachel Johnson syndrome of ...

I was going through my paces in Hyde Park, sweating out the booze, raising the heartbeat with short wind sprints, keeping my mind off the weekend’s debauchery and the ensuing Karamazovian hangover. I then sat down on a bench and took off my sweaty polo shirt, opened The Daily Telegraph, and took in some rays. That is when a police officer approached me, but with a smile: “Are you by any chance Taki?” “Guilty as charged, ...

A funny thing happened on my way to lunch last week. I opened the Daily Mail and read a few snippets about the Camilla-Charles saga by Penny Junor, stuff to make strong men weep with boredom, but then a certain item caught my eye: “Camilla and the Queen finally met in the summer of 2000, when Charles threw a 60th birthday party at Highgrove for his cousin King Constantine of Greece…. They shook hands, smiled at one ...

A major Greek shipowner, whose political knowledge matches his wealth and business acumen, explained to me what the Qatar brouhaha is all about. My friend had the foresight to invest in LNGs, natural liquid gas carriers, among the most expensive of ships to build but big-time moneymakers. Why is it that it takes a major shipowner to know what’s really going on, rather than the bull put out by American hacks whose minds ...

Once upon a time the American Establishment enjoyed business paragons such as David Rockefeller, Daniel Ludwig, William Paley, Henry Ford II, not to mention Thomas Watson and his son Thomas Watson Jr. Toward the end of the 20th century, that old power elite had gone with the wind, replaced by people that Hilaire Belloc used to refer to as money shufflers, hustlers who never created anything, but employed a few secretaries while ...

The most famous epigrammatic nugget of wisdom appears in The Leopard, Lampedusa’s great novel of a noble Sicilian family’s fortunes, and it is “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” I thought of the novel as I was driven up to Gstaad during last week’s heat wave. Disembarking in Geneva, I felt I was back in Nairobi circa 1970, on my way to Mombasa and a romantic interlude among the ...

They"€™re falling like dominoes, starting with the great Robert E. Lee, whose statue went down with a yank of a crane in a jiffy, after standing tall on his New Orleans perch for 133 years. Jefferson Davis is also down, and the great Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard, who partnered the heroic General Johnston on his left flank in the battle of Shiloh, has also bitten the dust. Removing statues of great American generals ...

I was busy explaining why the election was not a disaster to a 23-year-old American girl by the name of Jennifer. She is a Spectator reader and wants to work in England, preferably in politics. She called the results the worst news since her father abandoned her mother. I begged to differ. Actually, it was a far better result than if the Conservatives had won a plurality of 100, I told her. She gasped with disbelief, but soon ...

Main Street is a place, but it’s mostly an idea. It’s locally owned shops selling stuff to hardworking townies, as we used to call the locals back when I was in boarding school. The townies worked dependable blue-collar jobs in auto plants and coal mines. Their sons played American football hard, cut their hair short, and married their high school sweethearts. I went back to my old school recently with my old buddy Tony ...