As a child, the only list I had ever heard about was the FBI Ten Most Wanted. Then a lady who wrote about fashion"€”Eugenia Sheppard, I believe"€”made a list of the ten best-dressed women in the universe, and the dam was broken. Everyone started making lists. Lists appeared listing the best and worst lists, and the craze even traveled to Europe, where the Almanach de Gotha codifies and names the true aristocracy but does ...

The readers’ Spectator party was as always a swell affair, with longtime subscribers politely mingling with ne’er-do-wells like myself, the former having cakes and drinking tea, the latter desperately raiding the sainted editor’s office for Lagavulin whiskey. But for once I was on my best behavior, first out of respect for our readers, secondly because of the man I had personally invited to the party, Hannes Wessels, a ...

I am trying to decide with some friends what is worse, English weather or English football. The former is improving as I write, but the latter’s problems are terminal, too many “directors of development” and other jargon-packed non-jobs that interfere with the very simple process of developing football. Send them all to Iceland, bring on a dentist, and cut footballers’ salaries by 90 percent, and you just might one day ...

The two most beautiful words in the history of the world, and in any language, are “Molon Labe,” the accent on the second syllable of both words, the b pronounced v in the second. These two little words were the laconic response by King Leonidas of Sparta to the offer by the great Persian king Xerxes of not only safe passage, if they lay down their arms, but also a settlement of lands of better quality than any they had ...

Dancing around an unpleasant reality is what politics are all about nowadays"€”Donald Trump excluded"€”with political correctness the enveloping cloud that hides truth and the facts. There are boundaries that are set by those faceless gray men and women none of us ever see, those who control the networks, the newspapers, and the academy, in other words the so-called elite, and woe to anyone who dares defy them. Our elected ...

I always thought the Freuds a pretty sordid bunch, and after the latest revelations, it seems I wasn’t far off. I first met Clement Freud when John Aspinall employed him as an adviser for food and wine. He was lugubrious and aggressive, and none of us punters liked him one bit. He was not a gambler but talked as if he were a big one. While crossing the Atlantic on board the QE2 back in 1974, he tried to play the tough guy ...

Marion, Baroness Lambert, was hit and killed by a London bus last month while shopping on Oxford Street, a cruel irony if there ever was one. “At least a Bentley,” was the way Steven Aronson, the writer, put it. Marion was a very old friend of mine. She had endured the worst tragedy that can befall a mother, having lost a beautiful young daughter to suicide years ago. Philippine Lambert had been sexually abused by a ...

Shelter Island—Nestled in the Long Island Sound, ten minutes by ferryboat from Sag Harbor and a good thirty from the horrible Hamptons, their Porches, their mega-mansions, and their celebrity trash, lies the island that in my last week in the Big Bagel took me back to the ’40s and ’50s for a weekend. Shelter Island is what the Hamptons used to be: tranquil, beautiful, rustic, unspoiled, with lovely ponds bordered by shady ...

Write about things you really know, was the advice Papa Hemingway offered wannabe writers, so here goes: The French Open is still on, Wimbledon is coming up, and I’ve just read a lament by some Frenchwoman about how professional tennis and big-time sports have become ever more ubiquitous and ever more out of reach. Duh! A former model by the name of Géraldine Maillet has made a documentary about the 2015 French Open, not ...

Things have never been grimmer. Wall Street wolves have become billionaires while rigging the system, rats like William Kristol are showboating on television and spreading lies about The Donald, and the most dishonest couple since Bonnie and Clyde are getting themselves ready to reinhabit the White House. In times such as these, there is only one thing to do: lighten up, and then some. I remember it as if it were yesterday. It ...

Let’s face it, sleaze is to professional party-givers what jail is to burglars: an occupational hazard. I’ve been reading about parties in Cannes, described in glowing terms by stars-in-their-eyes hacks who should, but do not, know better. Well, dear readers of Taki’s Magazine, I’m afraid I’ve been there and done it all, and believe you me, “squalor” is the operative word. Obscene publicity-seekers posing as role ...

New York—I have never seen anything like it. If Adolf Hitler were running, he would match Donald Trump’s negative coverage. If Benito were in the race, his notices would be far more favorable. Once The Donald became the last man standing, some NY Times columnists became unhinged. One hysterical woman pundit accused Trump of…not having any money. The one I liked best was a colleague of hers who is usually unreadable ...

New York—It was the best of times—downtown—and the worst of times—uptown. Let’s start with the horror near the park: Cranial atrophy, unrelenting grossness, overarched and overgrown eyebrows, posterior-baring bondage outfits, and de haut en bas attitudes were the order of the night. Never has a museum site been more desecrated by a freak show, and the Met—maybe the best museum in the whole wide world—should be ...

Once the French had cleared out of Moscow in October 1812, special commissions were set up to investigate those who had played nice with the invaders. Only 22 people, all of them of foreign extraction, had failed to remain true to their oath of loyalty to the Tsar. They were duly sent to Siberia. To the Tsar's and the nobility's great relief, the serfs had not taken the opportunity the French offered them to rise up against ...

I read this in an American newspaper (it was written by a woman who used to edit my copy for a New York glossy, but I will withhold her name to save her embarrassment and social atrophy): “He’s hosted Kim Kardashian and Kanye West for Thanksgiving, regularly cruises with Justin Bieber on his party yacht….” The mind reels. Is it possible to read such crap without throwing up? How would you, dear reader, like to spend ...

The English writer E.M. Forster infamously said that if he had to betray either his country or a friend, he hoped he would betray the former. He was cheered for it by Oxford swells who had seen their elders slaughtered in the trenches during World War I, and by fellow homosexuals whose proclivities were illegal at the time. This was sometime in the "€™30s. I remember being appalled upon reading it and saying to myself how ...