My friend Mark Brennan and I were talking about class warfare. "It's cyclical," Mark said as he executed a perfect uchi mata during judo practice. "Perhaps over here," I answered, "but in Europe it's a way of life." "Just look at the 1890s, followed by the crash of 1907, then the Roaring Twenties before the Great Depression, and then the 80s and 90s followed by the crash of 2008," Mark ...
NEW YORK—Seeing Manhattan rising from the distance is always a treat. I am not sure it’s possible for anyone brought up around these parts to appreciate entirely what New York—the idea of New York—meant to us who came from the Old Continent. I was eleven years old and had seen only war and devastation: dead, stinking bodies in the city parks, bullet-scarred buildings, and people starving on the sidewalks, too weak to ...
Papa Hemingway’s recently published letter to an Italian male friend purportedly revealed the “human side” of which his admirers were already well aware. (Like Bogie, he was tough on the outside, jelly on the inside.) Until lately, Papa’s haters had a good long run. Soon after Carlos Baker’s matchless biography appeared in 1972, 11 years after Hemingway’s suicide, the naysayers started to gnaw away at Papa. The rats ...
Dr. David Starkey is a great man, a Tudor historian, and one of the few academics who tells it like it is. Openly gay, he has no time for prancing queens and other such clown minorities trying to steal a bigger slice of the freebie pie. After England’s riots last summer—while politically correct policy-makers were hand-wringing about inequality and other such urban-deprivation myths—he had the courage to mention “black ...
In the February 18 issue of the world’s greatest weekly I wrote that I had fallen madly in love with Jessica Raine, the actress who portrays nurse Jenny in the Sunday-night BBC show Call the Midwife. In the throes of demonic, erotic exhilaration, I may have piled it on a bit thick. So what? If Gordon Brown can ruin the British economy, Tony Blair can take Britain to war based on an outrageous lie, and both bums can still walk ...
Here we go again, sports fans! During a recent tennis match between two professionals in Indian Wells, California, a racial comment uttered by one of the players has the usual suspects up in arms. The newspaper that only prints what fits PC, the dreadful Big Bagel Times, was among the first to complain. Michael Llodra of France is usually a mild-tempered fellow, but in his winning match against Ernests Gulbis of Latvia, he ...
GSTAAD—It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas: nonstop snowfall, an empty main street, and the closing of the Palace hotel as well as the Eagle club. (I give the traditional closing-day speech at the club, and my oration this year was deemed politically incorrect.) The older I get the more I like it off-season. The toadies and parasites of the truly rich have followed their masters to places such as St. Barts or the ...
Who was the first to declare that nothing counts a lot and very little counts at all? The cynic and sesquipedalian Alastair Forbes claimed it, but he spoke with a forked tongue. Iris Murdoch hinted that it was hers, but she, too, was known for bending the truth. Either way, the saying is utter crap. A hell of a lot counts, starting with the fine line between mad love and pure madness. Don’t be alarmed—I will not go into yet ...
Briefly home from boarding school back in 1951, I went to a bar with a phony draft card, ordered a beer, and watched Rocky Marciano knock out my idol Joe Louis. Joe was 37 and trying for a comeback, as he was broke—and as he sat in his stool after having been counted out, he looked a lot older. Rocky crossed over from his corner, bent down to speak to Joe, and began to cry. Joe was his idol, too. Rocky went on to become world ...
When the bloated and declawed Las Vegas casino-money recipient Newt Gingrich had some fun recently over Mitt Romney's ability to speak a few words of French, Europeans took notice of this farce. The French are an angry nation: envious, supercilious, and eager to show superiority over those who invented Coca-Cola and the Big Mac. They are also forgetful, especially their amnesia regarding Uncle Sam's military forays to save la ...
A couple of weeks ago I wrote in this here mag about Syria. I played it safe. My point was that Assad was not as bad as what may come after him. I now know better. In the long sweep of history, those who play it safe are more often than not wrong. Here's a tip: If you want to get it right, choose the side Uncle Sam and the Fourth Estate see as a villain, and presto, you"ve chosen the good guy. Assad did not start this in ...
GSTAAD—It’s early in the silvery morning light as I look out my window up here in the heights. A batallion of wispy white clouds hides behind the surrounding mountains—a reminder that a perfect dawn makes for a perfect day’s skiing. The clouds play games. They wrap themselves around the peaks like snowcaps and then are chased away by the sun, only to return. Someone once compared the movement of ice to a soul’s ...
I was sad to read that the Attikon Cinema on Stadiou Street in central Athens was burned down by anarchist scum pretending to protest against the EU Nazis. The Attikon was built in 1870 as part of a beautiful, ocher-colored neoclassical edifice constructed by a German architect, only to be torched 142 years later by professional troublemakers posing as freedom defenders. It's par for the times to burn down an old beautiful ...
Who is worse—the pusher or the addict? I’d say it’s fifty-fifty as they sustain each other, although the addict has the moral high ground. Greece is the addict. The German and French banks are the pushers, with Brussels the Godfather shipping the stuff in from Afghanistan. The Godfather is not the cuddly Brando type, but rather an autocoprophagous degenerate who managed a coup d’etat while Europe slept. The Godfather is ...
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GSTAAD—Here I go again! I hear music and there’s no one there I smell blossoms and the trees are bare All day long I seem to walk on air…. Some of you must be getting rather tired of this, but I simply can’t help it. I swear on the Bible I’m not doing it on purpose. I dropped in on the terribly nice village doctor although I knew it was a total waste of our time. His diagnosis, as always with such symptoms: There is ...
As I watched last week’s Western posturing after the Russo-Chinese veto of the UN Security Council’s resolution against Syria, Captain Renault of Casablanca fame kept coming to mind. Like the good captain, who was shocked to discover gambling was taking place at Rick’s Café (while pocketing his winnings), I was shocked that Uncle Sam’s Secretary of State and her British equivalent were so upset that the big bad Russkis ...
