I feel like an obituary writer, what with Nick Scott, Roger Moore, Alistair Horne—all great buddies—having recently passed away, and now my oldest and closest friend, Aleko Goulandris, dead at 90. Mind you, they all had very good lives: plenty of women, lots of fun, accomplishments galore, and many children and grandchildren. And they all reached a certain age; what else can you ask from this ludicrous life of ours? Well, ...

Although both guilt and innocence fascinate me, I’m not so sure there is such a thing as redemption. I know, it sounds very unchristian, but there you have it. For me, bad guys remain bad, and good guys ditto. In the meantime, I didn’t make it to Rupert Deen’s memorial service, nor that of my first Spectator editor, Alexander Chancellor—two friends not known for feeling too guilty, nor for their innocence, come to think ...

The dinner party at an old friend’s house was as chic as it gets. Then a Trump insider asked, “Who is the American president who had an affair with a French president’s wife?” It was an easy one. And it’s been out there for years: The Donald has claimed he did Carla long before she got hitched to Sarkozy, but she has vehemently denied it and called him a lunatic. Perhaps this is grounds for impeachment, for ...

Much like the poor, the charity ball has always been with us, but lately it’s turned into a freak show. Something is rotten in the state of New York, and the name of it is the Met Gala. Once upon a time, the Metropolitan Museum’s gala ball was fun. Serious social-climbing multimillionaires competed openly for the best tables and for proximity to blue-blooded socialites like C.Z. Guest and her ilk. Pat Buckley, wife of ...

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 ...