Gstaad—Going up on a chairlift with the town’s doctor, I asked him, “How’s business, doc?” “Never better,” said the kind medical man. It seems the richer we get the more medical help is needed. “I get calls 24/7 for all sorts of ailment relief, especially coughs and colds,” said Dr. Mueller. “Rosey students, as opposed to local kids, are the most demanding.” I’m not surprised. The Rosey school has the ...
Athens—I am walking around downtown Athens watching thousands of migrants fielding pitches from smugglers for alternative routes to Germany and Austria. I ask a friendly policeman fifty years younger than me why he doesn’t arrest the smugglers and throw the key away. “Others will take their place quicker than we put the handcuffs on them,” he tells me. “And they pretend to be migrants the moment we ...
The rich are under attack nowadays, nowhere more than in America, where the Donald continues to trump his critics, amaze and surprise his fans, and drive his haters to paroxysms of sexual fantasies, with Trump as the main actor. National Review, where I got my start 40 or so years ago, devoted a whole issue to rubbishing Donald Trump, an issue that included everyone from great conservatives like Thomas Sowell to great clowns ...
Althea Gibson was a black American lady tennis player who won Wimbledon and many other major championships during the late "50s. She was also a very good singer and a friendly soul, carrying none of the anger and fury today's blacks exhibit the minute the spotlight shines on them. She passed away some years ago, without the headlines that accompany any black American who has claimed victimhood and has denounced America as a ...
One reason I do not tweet, text, or use Facebook or Instagram, and only wield a mobile when a landline is unavailable, is because all of the above gadgets are free of anything resembling a credible spoken word emanating from a disease-free brain. The mind-numbing gobbledygook that billions send back and forth constitutes a sort of 10th circle of Dante’s Inferno, oxygen-deprived brains with their imaginations up their ...
Gstaad—The locals here in the beautiful Saanen valley are split over the migrant crisis. Switzerland does not belong to the E.U., but the fascists in Brussels have pressed good old Helvetia to open its doors to those streaming out of Africa and the Middle East. Switzerland, a tiny country of 8 million, has already taken in 40,000, and I have personally seen about 30 Eritreans billeted in our old peoples’ home nearby. Now, ...
Gstaad—I had the rather subversive idea of offering a six-figure sum to Oriel College, Oxford. On one condition: that the college immediately terminate the Rhodes scholarship for the South African Ntokozo Qwabe, the hypocrite who led the campaign to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes, as well as any other recipients of Cecil’s munificence who are blackening his name a century later. It is the least these hypocrites deserve. ...
Athens—Viewed from Mars, this is a sunny, peaceful city. Up close, however, things ain’t what they used to be. First, those wonderful Greek smiles are gone, replaced by wintry ones at best. People are worried, as well they should be. At the Divani Caravel hotel, once owned by yours truly, the staff greets me like a conquering hero. I was a benevolent owner who used to party and spread the wealth. Now things are more ...
Gstaad—The Dolly Sisters were off to Davos last week for the World Economic Forum: Nat Rothschild and Sebastian Taylor in their finest, playing up to Harry Selfridge, in reality Christine Lagarde, the IMF chief under indictment. The purpose of a week’s total waste of time is advertised as a discussion of the global issues of the day. In reality it’s utter twaddle, unless one is networking like the Dolly Sisters, or ...
The death of David Bowie—why is it that Stephen Glover always gets it right about our overreaction and hysteria when a pop star goes the way of all of us?—twigged something that happened long ago, with Iman, his still-beautiful widow. It was exactly thirty years ago, on a rainy and cold night in New York. But first, a brief background to the story. In the winter of 1985 the mother ...
Thirty years or so ago, I wrote an article about a mugging in New York's Central Park, one that today would have got me arrested for breaching PC rules, but back then was overlooked by the Ministry of Truth, its Gestapo agents busy looking under our beds for anti-communists. A New York councilman, Andrew Stein, had been mugged by three black thugs and had his very expensive Rolex watch stolen. Otherwise ...
War and Peace has been in the news lately, so what was it that Leo wrote about all happy families being alike? Tolstoy came to mind last week right here in Gstaad when I encountered probably the worst-looking family I’ve ever had the bad luck to run into in the past 79 years. I wonder if Count Tolstoy ever considered writing a saga about how ugly families are all different in their ugliness. It was early evening when I walked ...
This is a certainty: Donald Trump would be the next chancellor if he were running for office in Germany. Mass assaults on German women by recently arrived Muslim Arabs have finally managed to change even the inherited-guilt German mind. Let's take it from the top: Germany took in more than a million Muslims last August and September, and continues to do so following Angela Merkel's reckless policy of open borders and generous ...
Okay, sports fans, what do Dame Vivien Duffield and Evelyn Waugh have in common? The answer is absolutely nothing, but why start 2016 with a dumb question such as this one? Waugh was short and round and so is Vivien, but except for height and weight there are no similarities. So why ask? Easy. I was reading about a dinner party Waugh gave for Clare Luce in November of 1949 at the Hyde Park Hotel. He later wrote to Nancy Mitford ...
Here's some more good stuff from the "academy" to get 2016 really rolling. It concerns Cecil Rhodes, the empire builder who left an Oxford University college more than 50 million big ones in today's money with the following stipulation: "No student should be qualified or disqualified for election to a scholarship on account of his race or religious opinion." This was back in the ...
2016 will be a hell of a year, hell being the operative word. It will be the year that the greatest Greek writer since Homer will turn 80, but we won"t mention this fact for quite a while yet. Our world is so stuck in reverse that a stabbed woman in Miami during the Art Basel shindig who was bleeding and begging for help was mistaken for "art" and ignored. The woman survived, but will art? Conceptual art must be the ...
