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 ...

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 ...