NEW YORK—Ten years ago this week I put my money down and The American Conservative magazine was born. They say that owning a yacht is like sitting under a shower tearing up hundred-dollar bills. Owning an opinion magazine based in Washington, DC is like sitting in a dull hotel room throwing thousand-dollar bills to the fire. A boat will at least get you some attention from the fairer sex—if it’s large and vulgar enough, ...
I stopped reading novels long ago. When those arch-phonies writing magic realism became household words, I dropped out quicker than you can say, "Raymond Chandler." Now that's what I call a novel"the stuff Chandler churned out about old El Lay, everyone gulping booze and puffing away like steam engines, and only exercising between the sheets. Crime writers have always had an inferiority complex about their work, but ...
NUEVA YORK–The dateline is in Spanish because I have yet to hear any English spoken here in the Bagel, and I landed in some style more than 24 hours ago. Never mind. Flying at 47,000 feet at close to 500 knots per hour on a G550 is as close to perfection in traveling as it gets. The G550 is the Mozart / Beethoven / Schubert / Schumann / Edward Hopper / Degas / William Holden / Burt Lancaster / John Wayne / Papa Hemingway / F. ...
GSTAAD—It was far, far worse than the Rodney King El Lay riots of twenty years ago, and it made the London summer fires of 2011 look like a kindergarten’s Guy Fawkes party. This was our Kristallnacht, and then some. They had hard faces, harder than a hedge-fund manager’s when told a good corner table is unavailable. They came early and there were lots of them. They were squat and dark, tall and wide, their fists at the ...
Forty-five years ago two Greek shipowners and the most famous diva of her time squared off in a British High Court over a financial dispute. Panaghis Vergottis, a gentleman and philanthropist, had sued Aristotle Socrates Onassis and Maria Callas over the ownership of a tanker the two men had bought for la Callas back when they were best friends. I suspect Vergottis had fallen in love with the fiery coloratura, and once Onassis ...
Here we go again! Scary sofa samurai Robert Kagan, a neocon so-called foreign-policy scholar, is also an expert on war, having watched a lot of Hollywood movies. Kagan says that if Obama were to use force against Iran, the election is over and he would win overwhelmingly. Kagan and his brother are inside-the-Beltway hucksters, always hustling and doing Israel's bidding, although not necessarily for cash. Zionists have countless ...
GSTAAD—Now is the time of sultry August days and nights, with the gift of privacy an added bonus. In summer the village contains the die-hards, the locals, and a few tourists. Bucolic freedom, fresh air, and sunshine were once anathema—foul-smelling, airless dives such as New Jimmy’s were the real McCoy—but now the sound of bells on roaming cows means instant happiness. It’s called old age. I can now walk from my ...
So the miracle has happened. A generation has been inspired and millions of children have been driven away from their televisions and handheld devices and have gone out on the track, running, jumping, throwing. Faster, higher, stronger. Thank you, Olympic Games, and see you down in Rio. And now back to reality. Yes, for once the Brits got it right and proved the gloom gluttons wrong. No, the rains did not come, just a few ...
With the exception of the French Academy immortals Michel Déon and Jean d’Ormesson, two wonderful writers and both the epitome of charm and graciousness, the French can be a pretty silly lot. They weren’t always. They got that way sometime between the two great wars. They turned even sillier during the German occupation and following their liberation from Eisenhower & Co. They were humiliated by Prussia in 1871, saved ...
GSTAAD—My chalet lies far above the village of Gstaad, but I happened to be en ville when I heard the pleasant sounds of an Oom-pah band and saw the Swiss burghers dressed up in their finest lederhosen marching through. It was a magnificent morning, the mountains glistening in the sun, the air fresh and clean, the kind of day Papa Hemingway could describe like no other. An elderly but very friendly American man jokingly asked ...
GSTAAD—If the London Olympics do not go down in history as The Crying Games, I will perform a sex act on a Mae West hologram in Times Square as the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve. What’s most confusing is that winners cried much more than losers. Their tears made the place look like Niagara Falls at times. What is happening to the Brits? Take the lightweight women’s double skulls. The event was won convincingly by ...
Thucydides carefully structured his Peloponnesian War history as a cautionary tale about the moral decay that accompanies abuses of imperial power. “It is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can,” said the Athenians blandly to the denizens of Melos before slaughtering them. (The tiny island of Melos, a Spartan colony, had refused to join an alliance with Athens in 416 BC, so the civilized Athenians ...
Gore Vidal was as good as it gets where writing is concerned. I can"t think of a single awkward sentence he ever wrote, and he wrote a hell of a lot for someone from a very privileged background who could do more enjoyable things than sit behind a typewriter. He wrote twenty-six novels, among which were Williwaw, The City and the Pillar, Washington, D.C., Myra Breckinridge, 1876, and his zinger, Julian, a novel about ...
Nicholas Soames is Winston Churchill's grandson, a Conservative member of Parliament since the early 80s, a very large man whose food and drink intake is legendary, and an old friend of mine with whom I used to get into terrible trouble. Soames has been married twice, his first wife having indiscreetly answered a hack's question about his lovemaking as "like having a wardrobe fall on top of you with the key sticking out of ...
GSTAAD—Purity in a sport does not mix with popularity, and defending the former is anathema to the hucksters, crooks, and profiteers who encourage the latter. In this I do not include the sportswriters of serious newspapers, with whom I sympathize. They see what’s going on, but they have to report on sports and there are libel laws to protect the guilty. In the birthplace of sports—where else but Greece?—football is as ...
The British public periodically goes ape over silly things such as cricket, Twiggy, the occasional sunny day, the Chelsea Flower Show, Guy Fawkes Night, and the not-so-direct descendants of King James I, whom Guy (AKA Guido) tried to blow up on November 5, 1605. Although James I was a Stuart and Elizabeth II is a Hanoverian, she wins the popularity stakes hands down because old Jimmy believed he was appointed by God. This ...
