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 ...
GSTAAD—Mountains in summer have a faraway astral beauty, snowy and shrouded in cloud peaks like old men wearing spats. Danger lurks in such mountains. Colin Thubron wrote about Tibet’s Mount Kailas, where locals offered sacrifices to Yama, the Buddhist god of death. Only last week eleven people lost their lives on Mont Blanc, and the numbers will likely reach close to one hundred by summer’s end. Mystics see icy mountain ...
What has happened to Wimbledon? A public crying jag would surely have embarrassed Baron von Cramm, a three-time losing finalist, as well as Rod Laver, Roy Emerson, and John Newcombe, all multiple crown winners. Back in my time, Lew Hoad won it and I took him to Les Ambassadeurs nightclub. No one recognized him, which was fine with Lew. So he repeated in 1957, murdering Ashley Cooper in the process, and once again we went out ...
The Spectator lost one of its most loyal readers when Alistair, 9th Marquess of Londonderry, died recently of that most dreaded pancreatic cancer, the very same that had killed his brother-in-law Jimmy Goldsmith fifteen years ago. Alistair would have been 75 in September, an age that Jimmy never came near. Sir James once told me that Alistair had the best brain of anyone he knew, with almost encyclopedic knowledge about ...
Back in September of 1970 I found myself in the charming ancient city of Damascus. The natives were friendly and helpful, especially as I was suffering from food poisoning thanks to a Lebanese kebab I"d eaten two days previously. My stay in the city was interrupted by the sudden death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian strongman who had been twice defeated by the Israelis yet remained a great hero to the Egyptian public. ...
ONBOARD S/Y BUSHIDO OFF CORSICA—For the last three days I’ve been watching people 110 years old prancing around bareheaded under a sun so fierce that no Taliban warrior would emerge from under his camel to face it. I tried to speak to the captain of one of these mega-ships, but he mistook me for a reporter and looked nervous until I pointed toward Bushido and told him I was the owner. He remained suspicious, as I had no ...
I"ve just had the worst time in my life rubbing shoulders"actually masts"with ghastly ex-Soviet Union gangsters, now called "oligarchs" by the gutter press and the New York Times/Washington Post Camorra. There are also towel-wearing Ay-rabs with obscene boats further polluting the French Riviera, but it's the oligarchs playing Commodore Vanderbilt who make the fabled south of France stink of necrosis. Never ...
It is very still as I sit down to write, the atmosphere heavy and oppressive. They say time flies, but less so if one looks backward. Nearly a thousand years before Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, Emperor Justinian was embarrassed to discover that his Greek subjects were not paying their taxes. Cheating the authorities has become a trademark of modern Greece and is often attributed by philhellenes to the 400-year ...
