When I hear the words Sykes-Picot I more often than not feel like punching an Englishman or a Frog—any Englishman, any Frog—in the mouth, but then I think of François Georges-Picot’s granddaughter Olga, and my pugilistic thoughts turn to romantic mush. More about those two arrogant and ignorant fools later, but first Olga. I was twenty-two and she was nineteen or twenty and we met in New York where she was studying ...
As everyone who has ever joined a club knows, Pugs is the world’s most exclusive one, its 19 members varying from German nobility and Greek and Danish royalty to the British upper classes, Indian nobility, and American and Greek aristocracy. Plus Sir Bob Geldof and Roger Taylor, of pop music royalty. Club rules forbid membership to exceed 21, hence a titanic struggle is taking place as I write to fill our last two spots. ...
"Summertime, and the livin" is easy," as the song tells us. Or it used to be, as my father complained when confronted on his boat by the "vacances payées," the socialist French system that ensured all working people could invade the south of France for a month and still collect their salaries. Old Dad was a very fair employer"he owned textile factories and tankers"but he liked his Riviera beaches ...
Gstaad—A slight bump at 30,000 feet concentrates the mind, as the good Dr. Johnson said about an appointment with the gallows. Halfway over the Atlantic and lost in a fantasy, I came back in a hurry as the plane shook and trembled, yet my first thought was to show off, pretend I hadn’t noticed, exhibit a kind of brazen indifference while my co-passengers nervously tightened their seatbelts. It was only a bump, the nose ...
Last week in the Bagel, and then London here I come. As I write, hundreds of thousands of Jews are marching up 5th Avenue for “Salute to Israel Day.” They have been marching for close to six hours and although not as messy as the Puerto Ricans, they come close in noise and provocation. Looking out from my window I see only blue and white Israeli flags, no stars and stripes whatsoever, and the chants I hear are those of the ...
I write this while American unmanned flights and 18 American "specialists" are looking for those 200 unfortunate girls abducted by Boko Haram, a group our very own Hillary Clinton had refused to place on a terrorist watch list of the State Department. Boko Haram is as bad as it gets and as violent as it can be, but it's no different from al-Nusra Front or ISIS, fighting in Syria against the government of Bashar ...
New York—Here’s a question for you loyal readers: If a fellow asks his wife to cook him a hearty meal of goat meat and she serves lentils instead, is he within his rights to beat her to death with a stick, as a New Yorker who is on trial this week did? Mind you, Noor Hussain is not a native Noo Yawker; he comes from Pakistan, but he’s as American as, I guess, not apple pie but the lentils that got him in this spot of ...
So the wedding of my little girl to Andy Bancroft Cooke went off without a hitch, a wonderful ceremony in a beautiful Catholic church off Portman Square and even the weather played ball and gave us the most perfect spring day imaginable, cloudless and cool, Green Park at its most glorious as we drank outdoors in the long terrace and lunched in Spencer House, which pulled out all the stops. It’s hard to believe but as I was ...
Like the late Christopher Hitchens, who only discovered his Jewish roots once he had moved to New York in the late Seventies, Donald Sterling has also had a revelation and is advertising the fact that he’s a Jew. For any of you who might not be aware who Sterling is, he was born Tokowitz 81 years ago but changed his name to Sterling to sound ritzier. He is a slum landlord who evicts poor women and orphans, began his career ...
For some of you younger readers the name Schmuel Gelbfisz will not ring a bell. Yet back in the 30s, Schmuel Gelbfisz’s identity was a dinner party quiz, and the one who guessed correctly would receive a kiss from Mary Pickford—America’s sweetheart—if he happened to be a man, or an expensive trinket if a lady got it right. Schmuel was born in Warsaw, Poland, in July 1879, a Hasidic Jew, but later allegedly falsified his ...
The vicissitudes of getting old are linked to the mystical innocence of childhood as one daydreams the precious time away. I’m a daydreamer par excellence, and lately I’ve been thinking nonstop about my daughter. She’s getting married this week and I’m off to London for the festivities. Solipsist that I am, it’s nice to think of others for a change. It’s the nature of prestidigitation to mix one’s self and one’s ...
NEW YORK — The poet was right, April is the cruelest month. We at the Spectator lost Clarissa Tan, my good friend Bob Geldof’s 25-year-old daughter Peaches died, and my oldest friend from prep school buried his son, one of the greatest athletes of his time, at age 42. There is something obscene about surviving the young, something only politicians like Tony Blair can do and still smile, and A.E. Housman got it right in his ...
Back in 1961 a CIA agent and I approached Thomas Lejus, who won the 1959 boys" singles championship for the Soviet Union at Wimbledon. We took him to Café Royal, where Oscar Wilde and Whistler and other such swells used to hang their top hats. The agent spoke first. "Thomas, if you decide to stay in the West, we will give you a Ford car with an automatic reclining roof and a large electric fridge, and make sure your ...
This is a tale of two unpunished crimes in one city. Let’s start with my old friend the Rev. Al Sharpton. I call him an old buddy because about fifteen years ago, in a downtown restaurant, a boxer friend asked the strutting Sharpton if he wanted to meet yours truly. The reverend did not miss a beat: “Man, I got better things to do than meet Taki,” he snorted. I burst into laughter, so he stopped and shook my hand and I ...
America and Western Europe sure have their priorities right, with newsworthy items blanketing newspapers and magazines while the airwaves reflect our culture. For example, it seems that the April cover of Vogue Magazine, featuring a rap thug and a porn tart, has been covered as extensively as the sinking of the Titanic was back in 1912, except that those were pre-TV and pre-Internet times, and only ink-stained wretches invaded ...
New York—Back to the mythic city, dreamed into existence by the movies long ago and instantly memorable, a visually stunning place built for action and adventure, a city of broad avenues and narrow side streets, of soaring towers and grubby tenements all giving an air of what Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon growled dreams are made of. But what’s happened to the gritty stoops of Harlem, the waterfront filled with gleaming ...
