By the time August rolls around there will be hundreds of books, thousands of articles, and millions of words spoken by mostly pompous people about who was responsible for starting World War I. The Brits were the first off the mark to blame the Germans. They would, wouldn"t they? Max Hastings, a very good English historian who affects upper-class mannerisms (his father was a tabloid hack) and has the most extraordinary ...
GSTAAD—Although no longer a regular habit, extended benders now turn me into a sort of magnetic field that picks up pearls as though they are iron filings. They are insightful jewels, not the kind that tarts hang around their necks to alert the viewer of their availability. Take for example a description of a couple I know by a man I have never met but had read about. It was 5AM last week, a heavy snow was blanketing the ...
Welcome, Mr. 2014. If you turn out as good as Mr. 2013 did, we"ll get along just fine. Throughout last year I got happier and happier. In fact, it keeps getting better and better and at times I think there must be something very wrong with me. But I should not dare fate, nor the gods, because one's fortune can change more quickly than an Italian government. What it comes down to is that the mystery of joy does not pose a ...
One of the great but perverse pleasures of my life when I"m in New York City is to read The New York Times. It's perverse because no paper north of Saudi Arabia lies quite as blatantly as the Times does. Its lying is based on omission rather than invention and by the use of the kind of selectivity on news reporting that would earn a Soviet-era Pravda newshound the Stalin Prize. Excluding facts, indeed stories, which do not ...
During these holidays we should take a second and send our best wishes to the neocons, poor dears, who are having a bad time during this holy season because their plans have gone awry"for at least the next six months. Ten years ago they were sitting pretty. Saddam had fallen, his chemical and nuclear weapons were about to be discovered, and a new, improved Middle East loomed on the horizon. Well, we all know what a con ...
This Christmas our thoughts need to be with our fellow Christians who are being threatened in the biblical lands. No ifs or buts about it, they are being told to either join the Sunni-led opposition to Assad and renounce Christianity or die. After decades of protection by a secular-leaning dictatorship, the Saudi-financed jihadists are giving ultimatums for a very dark future for Christians. There already has been Christian ...
NEW YORK—I’m in an extremely happy state as I write this because a young Englishman flew over the ocean just to have lunch with me and ask for my daughter’s hand in marriage. This is how things used to be done, but alas no longer. I will not reveal his name until it happens—I am very superstitious—but suffice it to say he went to Eton and Oxford, comes from a fine and very old English family, and has a beautiful ...
I recently sat down with a friend of more than fifty years, Reinaldo Herrera, and was filmed while lunching by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, also an old friend, discussing the past. The Herrera house is a grand one, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and Graydon's idea was to film two people who had experienced what life was like back during the 1950s and early 60s, when manners mattered more than money and how ...
NEW YORK—Nature is at her best right now, the leaves still holding, Central Park awash in golden browns and reds. I go there every morning, half a block away from my house, and under a giant elm I put the creaky body through its paces. Twenty push-ups, thirty deep knee bends, twenty-five kicks over a knee-high bar for each leg, and I finish with twenty-five punches against a leaf for speed and accuracy. Then a quiet walk and ...
Here's a funny coincidence. Just as Netanyahu is hyperventilating against the interim deal Uncle Sam has struck with Iran in Geneva, a poster campaign by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Berlin intended to identify aging Germans who might have participated in Nazi crimes has produced more than 3,000 posters in cities all over Germany. "Late But Not Too Late" is what the signs say, with a concentration camp in the ...
Is there anything better for Christmas than a bit of a laugh? Well, a visit by, say, the blonde CIA agent in Homeland would be preferable, but I think she's got other things on her mind than yours truly. Great comebacks are my favorites. For example: When the great French actress Arletty was dragged into court and accused of giving comfort the French way to a German Luftwaffe officer, her only defense was, "If you men ...
You know you’re old when people start writing kindly about you. Especially when they are colleagues. First Jeremy Clarke, now Deborah Ross. Debbie could of course be spoofing—if you look down at your bag of popcorn you’ll miss me—but thank you very much anyway. When my new boat is ready there will be a cabin built exclusively for Deborah Ross. The only thing she really got wrong is the moolah. If I’m a billionaire, ...
Everyone’s doing it, so I might as well jump in also. After all, I knew so many of the people involved, including JFK and his widow Jackie, and—sorry for the name-drop—even actor Rob Lowe, who plays the slain president in the film that’s coming out for the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. I only met Senator John Kennedy once—a year before he became president—at a party thrown by Alice Topping, a society ...
I suppose the secret of death is to choose not to expire on the same day as famous people. I read in Lapham’s Quarterly that JFK, C. S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley all met with the man in the white suit on November 22nd, 1963. John Jay Mortimer, a friend of very long standing, died last week and I attended his funeral in Tuxedo Park, the seat of his very old and fine family. After his daughter Minnie gave the reading, Lewis ...
Like all proper banana republics, the Olive Republic of Greece has jailed some elected members of Parliament and charged them with criminality, as obscure and vague an accusation as hooliganism used to be when Uncle Joe Stalin was displeased with some Russian writer. Stalin used dissidents for target practice; the present gang in power in the birthplace of selective democracy simply lifts their parliamentary immunity and sticks ...
NEW YORK—Hot money from China, India, Russia, and Singapore is pouring into London; hotter money from the same countries is flooding into the Bagel. London has become unaffordable for the average Joe around Kensington and Chelsea, as has the West Village in downtown New York. Well, “unaffordable” is relative. There is a delicate social-ecology system pointing toward the wrong direction in both metropolises, but—like a ...
