GSTAAD—Except for the hovering of helicopters overhead carrying great slabs of rock or timber, the constant whirring of cranes and cement mixers, and the roar of trucks, the building site that Gstaad becomes the moment the last billionaire departs for places closer to sea level takes on a dreamlike visual vignette of an alpine village. So faint is my memory of the village I first came to love back in the 1950s, I sometimes ...

On July 1, 1961, a beautiful 17-year-old girl appeared on the cover of Paris Match, back then in its heyday: “C’est une deb,” announced the cover, the once-upon-a-time annual British ritual having passed the Channel to the land of cheese. Her name was Cristina de Caraman, daughter of the Duke de Caraman, and she was so pretty and angelic-looking that even my mother, who was always after me to marry Greek, told ...

GSTAAD—The American newspaper that prints only news it sees fit to poison good things with recently published an article that dared to ask, “The End of Snow?” “The planet has warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1800s,” it declared, “and as a result, snow is melting.” Bring on the Pulitzers—snow melts! The Big Bagel Times also thundered that “Europe has lost half its Alpine glacial ice since ...

For some fifty years now it seems that God has played a great joke on mankind, granting the best fuel reserves to undeserving desert places run by crooked camel drivers: places such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Libya, Turkmenistan, and other such hellholes. Mind you, God plays fair, and he also blessed places such as the United States and Norway with black gold, and in order to show his favorite, he made Texas the oiliest of all. ...

Damn, damn, damn! It has to be me, and here all these years I thought it was Hollywood. By the time you read this the Oscars will all be over (like the Olympics), but I had someone play 12 Years a Slave on my television set—it’s called Apple TV, but I’m incapable of making it work on my own—and could only watch for ten minutes. Then I had the nice woman who assists me change the film. To me it was like watching ...

One of life’s safest bets is that following a visit by a Japanese premier to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the nation’s war dead, a lot of Chinese mega-crooks and inheritors of the greatest murderer of all time will cry foul, and lots of buffoons of the neocon and liberal persuasion over here will echo them. A particularly mendacious fraud, one Daniel Sneider, who is described as an “associate director of ...

GSTAAD—Walking into a dinner party for fifty chic and some not-so-chic people in a nearby village last week, I was confronted by a tall man with horn-rimmed glasses who called me his neighbor but then added, “No, you’re not my neighbor—what’s your name?” No cunning linguist I, nor used to being barked at by nouveau-riche whippersnappers, I turned my back to him and told him to “Look it up in ...

In the movie business, conventional wisdom has it that to succeed at the box office a film must include profanity, obscenity, blood, gore, blasphemy, and, of course, lots of sex. There’s only one little problem with this theory. Empirical data illustrates that the opposite is true. Clean, wholesome family affairs generally do much better at the till. Yet motiveless violence and crimes committed at random continue to be ...

GSTAAD—“On ne touché pas une femme, meme avec une fleur,” says an old French dictum, one not always adhered to in the land of cheese or anywhere else, for that matter. However hackneyed it may sound—don’t you hate it when a hack declares an interest in order to gain Brownie points for honesty?—I nevertheless will declare one. I’ve been a friend of the Somerset family for about fifty years, ...

My first memories of learning were The Iliad and The Odyssey. This was Greece, after all, and although it was mythology, as a three- to four-year-old I took Achilles, Helen, Menelaus, Hector, and Odysseus very seriously. After that came the Persian Wars. My father had just left for the front against the Italians in Albania, so the great victories of Marathon and Salamis sounded even sweeter as our first win against ...

Call me sentimental, but I’ve never seen a better opening ceremony than the Sochi one, evoking Russia’s great past in literature and many other things. The ballet sequence was tops, especially the acrobatics by the black-clad dancer portraying the cruel officer of War and Peace who seduced Natasha. All those hysterics about boycotts and terrorism were just hypocritical sensationalism by those PC jerks that seem to ...

GSTAAD—A heavy snowfall diverted some forty-odd private jets from landing in Saanen airport, thus the one percent of the one percent that came to Gstaad for a grand wedding last weekend used conventional travel methods. Actually, it was more of the one hundredth of one percent that lefties complain about, 650 of them arriving for Tatiana Santo Domingo’s marriage to Andrea Casiraghi, son of Princess Caroline of ...

GSTAAD"€”From the top of the mountain that overlooks my Swiss chalet I can almost see Lake Geneva"€”on a clear day, that is, but thankfully what I cannot see are the armies of so-called diplomats, flunkeys, arms dealers, professional wallet-lifters, con men, thieves, and men who have been conceived by apes with a dose of the clap that go by the name of imams. They are all here polluting the base of the Alps on the pretense ...

GSTAAD—If a catastrophic avalanche were to crush the Davos convention hall where the fat cats of this world were meeting recently, I’m afraid there would be a lot of discreet raising of glasses by many so-called populists, who are basically envious “haves” that have plenty but don’t particularly like people who have more than they do. This Ed Miliband chappie is a populist, as are Bill and Hillary Clinton, not to ...

OK, folks. We’ve had enough of Hollande and his rather silly antics, although I do understand the man. Ever younger is not a bad policy, in sport as well as in sexual matters, but it does give off a certain bad smell—it’s called a Saatchi—something real men actually never get caught doing. Seducers have been the whipping boys in books, plays, poems, and in films through time immemorial, starting with Paris of Troy. ...

Al Goldstein, who made the front page of The New York Times when he died recently, was among the world’s most disgusting men. But he was hardly as repellent as Charles Saatchi and certainly without the coward’s bullying manner—against women, that is. Goldstein founded Screw magazine during the 1960s and pushed hardcore porn into the mainstream without the usual excuses of it being art disguised as porn. He apologized for ...