NEW YORK—Life is definitely beautiful…as long as one can see, that is, which for two miserable days last week I couldn’t. Having had a glaucoma operation on my eyes two months ago, I needed to use drops for a while but didn’t pay attention—too many girls in their summer dresses, and things like that. The next thing I knew, a pain started in one eye, I ignored it and went out and smoked and drank, then woke up the next ...
Which is the most infamous bite in history? Surely Adam’s, but the one Steve Rubell took off Halston’s leg was far more expensive. Let me explain for you whippersnappers who’ve probably never heard of these men. Both died of AIDS in the early 1990s. I was reminded the time Rubell bit Halston by the story of Luis Suárez, no stranger to controversy in Britain but a hero in his homeland of Uruguay, where biting is the ...
I write this during the weekend that finally saw the end of those two dreadful Chechens who were described by many newspapers"starting with the Times, of course"as typical American teenagers. Why is it that after every outrage, family members and friends of the perpetrators are given space to air their sick views here in the United States? I can"t remember British newspapers, or even the grotesquely lefty BBC, ...
NEW YORK—The search for the two Chechen terrorists in Boston was nothing compared to mine for new digs in the Big Bagel. I accrued reams of knowledge while cruising the City that Never Sleeps with real-estate agents—did you know that New York has 5,200,000 trees? April is still cold and the branches are bare, but the pear and cherry trees are in full bloom and soon Manhattan will be under a green canopy. On my way to judo ...
NEW YORK—I chose to live on 68th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenue because it’s next to Central Park and is considered as convenient an address as any in the city. It’s not so far uptown that it’s near the DMZ—92nd Street—and not too close to the shopping shrines down by the 50s. The house where I live now used to be the Austrian consulate, and across my second-floor flat I can look into a grand embassy ...
NEW YORK—When the president of the United States has to publicly apologize for calling a woman “the best-looking attorney general in the country,” I know it’s time, as we used to say in boarding school, to hang up my jock. Kamala Harris is a big busty black woman with Asian blood. I will for the record state that I would not ask her to vacate my bed, but Obama did not even go that far. All he did was praise her looks, ...
NEW YORK—When Greek democracy was restored back in 1974, some “democratic”-leaning newspapers tried to criminalize my writings—so much so, I was sentenced to 16 months in the pokey for reputedly “anti-Greek” comments. I did not serve the sentence, which was eventually thrown out on appeal. I left for London instead, and the Greek media’s loss became the Spectator’s gain. Greek authorities do not seem to have ...
OK, the tenth anniversary of the worst foreign blunder Uncle Sam has ever committed has come and gone, but the post-invasion headlines remain the same: Explosions in Baghdad kill dozens and wound scores "International Herald Tribune, 3/20/13 For Iraqis, no time for reflection, only desperation " International Herald Tribune, 3/19/13 Iraq War Intelligence Was a Lie "Daily Telegraph, 3/18/13 No Country Since 1945 ...
A nice package arrived by post just as I was going to ring a friend in London and inquire how old and how good was a title whose bearer uses it more often than a footballer says the F-word. I will not name the bum because I did a few weeks back and he doesn’t need more publicity. All I’ll say is thank God for the Almanach de Gotha, which arrived in brilliant cardinal red for 2012 and beautiful Byzantine yellow for the 2013 ...
He was a member of a charmed circle of Hellene and Philhellene intellectuals just before and after World War II, experiencing modern Greece and seeing it as a place rich in beauty and a stimulus to artistic creation. Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose biography by Artemis Cooper I just put away almost in tears—like a magical night with a girl of one’s dreams, I didn’t want it to end, but end it did—was a second Byron in Greek ...
It felt like a stiletto jab in my liver, a pain so sharp it will take half a century to forget. Jessica Raine—AKA Nurse Jenny in Call the Midwife—has shacked up with a married man, an actor and a redhead to boot. It is as if I heard my mother had run off with an Albanian gigolo or Russell Brand. Nurse Jenny is the kind of girl one takes home to mother, just like Natalia Vodianova is the type one takes to Marcel ...
Oh, to be in England! The weather is bad, the cities are crowded with bearded Pakistanis, and the law shields foreign criminals from being deported under the dubious right to family life. In other words, all a foreign criminal in Britain has to do once he's convicted and about to be deported is get a British girlfriend. I kid you not. An army of ambulance-chasing lawyers makes sure the criminals know their rights. So the ...
I recently addressed The Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society for the Kilburn Lecture on “The Future of the Olympic Games.” Instituted in 1781, the learned society is Britain’s second oldest after the Royal Society. John Dalton, the father of modern chemistry, was one of its important past members. My NBF Peter Barnes (I had to explain to him the acronym meant New Best Friend) picked me up at the airport and ...
I was distressed to learn of some of your current problems and wanted to send you a word of encouragement. Since the time Bob Tyrrell introduced us a few years ago, I have been one of your admirers…. That letter, dated January 23, 1985, was addressed to me and was signed by Richard Nixon. I had it framed and it hangs in my office. The only other letter hanging next to it is from Sir Denis Thatcher after he and the Lady ...
GSTAAD—The Alps are aglow like never before. A record snowfall and an abundance of sun have turned the region into a postcard of long ago. From afar, that is. Up close the cranes are ever present, although during the season building is verboten. For the last few years I’ve been meeting with three Greek childhood friends once a week for lunch in a nearby inn. They are: Aleko Goulandris, my oldest friend (we met in 1945); ...
Hollywood is having one more shot at Gatsby"the sixth one. The first filmed Gatsby was silent, pun intended. My favorite was the second, made in 1949 and starring Alan Ladd. The blond, short Ladd had those hooded eyes and sharp features that conveyed depth as well as sensitivity while looking pretty tough. The Great Gatsby is the novel that made F. Scott Fitzgerald an immortal, but when it was first published in 1925 it was ...
