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 ...
“Hanky-panky” is American slang for doing what comes naturally. On this Valentine’s Day week, I offer you Swoon, a book about great seducers—and why women love them—one I knocked off in an afternoon. It is author Betsy Prioleau’s third book about hanky-panky. (Her book Seductress examined history’s most powerful sirens.) Betsy Prioleau is the wife of probably the nicest doctor I’ve ever had, a New York gentleman ...
GSTAAD—Sir Roger Moore told the Sunday Telegraph that he enjoys the slow pace of life in Switzerland. As do I. One cannot have too much of a snowy peak under a blue sky any more than one can have too much of Schubert. Looking out from my bedroom window all I can see are pine forests, rock cliffs, and snow. Not a bad scene for the winter blues. Yes, nature has been degraded, with chalets being built ever higher in the ...
Clive James is weak on health but very strong on intellect, and it’s good to read his pithy television criticism for the Telegraph. Clive recently praised Richard E. Grant for pointing out in his program on the Riviera’s history of pictures that not many people nowadays know how good a painter Gerald Murphy was. Murphy was the model for Dick Diver in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. He was the owner of Mark Cross, a ...
In a tiny hamlet next to where I live high up in the Swiss Alps, two gay friends of mine have set up house, and a beautiful old chalet it is. One man, a German, looks like a Panzer commander straight out of central casting; the other is an Englishman, more P. G. Wodehouse than John Bull. Both are very nice, very good-looking, generous, and amusing. I recently asked them if they planned to marry. They looked at me as if I had ...
PARIS—Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter still evoke the verbose sophistry of Sartre, although the tourism and jewelry trades have replaced the rendez-vous des intellectuels. Yet the sheer stunning beauty of the 7eme reminds one why Paris is still the most romantic capital of Europe, the city Papa Hemingway called a fine place to be young in, the city that’s a necessary part of a man’s education. Late at night ...
On the brilliant summer's morning of June 8, 1967, the USS Liberty, a technical research ship lying in international waters about 25 miles north of the Sinai Peninsula, was suddenly attacked by Israeli fighter jets and Israeli Navy torpedo boats. The Liberty's captain, immediately realizing that an ally was attacking his ship, frantically signaled his coordinates to the diving jets and the surrounding torpedo boats firing at ...
GSTAAD—The subprimate level of conversation, as prevalent as the snow up here in the Alps, took a turn for the better last week when a select few celebrated Prince Nicolas Romanoff’s ninetieth birthday at the yacht club. Yes, most people who live up here are illiterate, but they sure know how to count—some even up to ten billion. None of the counters were present at the birthday, just many old friends that included some ...
New Year's resolutions work only for bores and ambulance-chasing, money-grubbing lawyers. Normal people do not and cannot stick to them. Hence I will list for you my irritants of 2013, hoping against hope that they"ll disappear, but I don"t advise any Taki's Mag reader to hold his breath. Bill Maher. His political correctness aside, he has a repulsive face, a nose that closely resembles a penis, and a mind so fine that ...
