Do any of you still like the dreaded word “diversity,” which is proudly flung around by those who squirm when the great Enoch Powell’s name comes up? If anything, Powell was a prophet, and after the latest London outrage, his so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech sure comes to mind. He got it right while midgets such as Heath and Howe sold and keep on selling the country out to diversity. Can any of you imagine a time ...
The only man I know who belonged to more gentlemen's clubs than Eddie Ulmann was the late Bobby Sweeny of amateur golf fame, who once pleaded poverty to me while signing checks to something like twenty clubs spread around the Western world. Eddie was the quintessential clubman. He cherished his clubs, took part in club activities until the very end, and was as popular with the members as he was with the staff of the various ...
CANNES—It’s raining, the stars are hiding, the hacks and paparazzi are waterlogged and frustrated, and the shimmering images of the beautiful people walking up the red carpet are just that—images of glories long gone. The Cannes Film Festival used to be a glamorous affair when I was a young man. I remember the brouhaha when a French wannabe starlet ripped off her bra and showed her assets to Robert Mitchum, reputedly the ...
At an art shindig on Park Avenue, I spotted Baz Luhrmann, the director of the latest and very noisy version of The Great Gatsby. I found him a charming man before I was shocked—shocked à la Captain Renault—to hear the dwarfish mayor of the Big Bagel suggest an honorary American citizenship for that Russian son-of-a-bitch Roman Abramovich. Too bad I didn’t have my American passport with me, because I would have thrown it ...
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 ...
