NEW YORK—I had a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious week—so good, it took a weekend in Connecticut to recover from it. Let’s begin with the Norman Mailer benefit gala. The Mailer Center is an extraordinary achievement only four years following the great man’s death. Larry Schiller, the human battery behind it, has turned Mailer’s Cape Cod house into a young writers’ colony, handing out scholarships and shelter and ...
A recent libel case won by Lady Moore, wife of Sir Roger Moore of James Bond fame, called for my testimony in London, and for once I was happy to oblige. Roger Moore is a friend of very long standing, as is his son Geoffrey, who lives fifty yards away from me in Gstaad. British hacks are notorious for never allowing facts to get in the way of a good story, but in this case the Daily Mail paid dearly for involving the wrong ...
NEW YORK—God, it’s great to be Greek right now. We’ve out-front-paged the Holocaust as well as Iran’s “existential threat” to Israel. (The latter has been jerked up a notch, with Big Bagel papers presenting the Iran “problem” as if it’s 1939 and the Nazis have the bomb.) When the Greek alarm first sounded in mid-2009 in an IMF report, what do you think the elegant Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the towering Sarkozy, ...
NEW YORK—According to Virgil, Libyans are “a people rude in peace and rough in war.” The old boy wrote this a couple thousand years ago, so we have to give him some slack. He was obviously not speaking about the present rabble. As far as I’m concerned, most Libyans are human biohazards. The media have played up their fighting abilities, but it’s all show and boast. Afghanis they are not. The Libyans were the only ...
FORT WORTH, TEXAS—To the best state in the Union for the annual John Randolph Club meeting of true conservatives, hip, hip. No posturing peacocks spouting gibberish learned at university diversity courses here, but witty, juicy, intelligent criticisms of today’s cultural sewer and the part liberals and Christendom’s enemies play in destroying our society. “I disagree with everything you have been saying and doing, you ...
The London Spectator is the oldest weekly magazine of the English-speaking world, a jewel of a magazine as distinguished and respected as it is elegantly written. It was first published in 1828, just as modern Greece became a nation, and in a recent speech the sainted editor remarked that the Speccie was as old as its longest-running columnist, which is yours truly. Graham Greene, no slouch where writing is concerned, called ...
NEW YORK—The morning routine is now a pleasure. Up early, stretch and bend the creaky limbs, hit the coffee, then off to judo and karate. Last week I only managed to get drunk twice, hence there were five such mornings. And what mornings they were. Stolen from summer without the oppressive heat, one crosses the park from east to west, the sun flooding the paths with light, creating long shadows to go along with the tall ...
Hearing about the black American fugitive who was caught recently after 40 years on the lam brought back lots of memories. No, I’m not black and I’ve never been a fugitive from justice, but the memories are quite pleasant because I met all those Black Liberation Army conmen in Algeria just about the time George Wright flew in from Boston to join them. It was pre-PC but worse. I remember one night at the Sherry Netherland in ...
NEW YORK—Here is the $64-million question: Is there a moral case against soaking the rich? I can’t think of a better place to ponder such an issue than right here in the womb of capitalism, the Big Bagel, taking into account that within the narrow corridor that is Manhattan Island some of the greediest, as well as grubbiest, human beings live and work. The second-richest American, a Nebraskan, says that the state ...
NEW YORK—An English prof made an Earth-shattering discovery about ten years ago—there is a strong link between having money fall upon you and being happy. He didn’t win a Nobel for it, nor for his conclusion, which was that money buys autonomy and independence. The prof should have won a Nobel Prize for excessive stupidity instead, especially for his last neologism: “To turn a really unhappy person into a very happy ...
I’ve often written about Israel, and not always in a flattering light. After president Rabin was assassinated (his wife once told me that she preferred Arafat to Netanyahu any day), I lost all hope that reason, wisdom, and humanity might prevail in the Holy Land. Partly, I keep returning to a subject that does not exactly endear me among Jewish friends because Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians offends my sense of ...
OK. Things are heating up in the old continent after a boiling summer. October will be the cruelest month, as the poet didn’t exactly say, but it might also be crunch time. Europeans seem more sophisticated than the parochial, law-abiding, taxpaying suckers in the good old US of A, but they’re no better than the pompous, self-proclaimed elite within the Beltway. Multiculturalism (human rights for those who don’t respect ...
GSTAAD—One of the safest countries on Earth is in trouble. Good old Helvetia, a country more up and down than sideways, according to Papa, could end up on its head. Its industrial base might melt as its currency is much too strong for its own good, and deflation might set in as the Swiss National Bank is printing money to tie its fortune to the euro. Lashing the franc to the euro seems suicidal, but such are the joys of ...
Jacqueline Kennedy’s oral history is now out, as told to the Kennedy courtier cum historian Arthur Schlesinger. In a foreword her daughter Caroline, another keeper of the Camelot flame, says that her mother’s story was told during “the extreme stages of grief.” I do not doubt it, but the widow’s sadness certainly does not come through when polishing the Kennedy apple. My recollections of the time differ from those of ...
GSTAAD–This is the worst news I’ve had since the surrender at Stalingrad. The Spectator’s deputy editor has become engaged to a former advisor to my favorite minister, Iain Duncan Smith. But how can this be when the deputy editor is already engaged to me? If true, what does it make her—words fail me—a bigatrothed? All I know is that I’m flying to London so I can investigate. If worse comes to worse I am going to hit ...
AIX-EN-PROVENCE—I attended a young friend’s wedding to a celebrity DJ in a beautiful tent in an olive grove. Had a short chat with the beautiful Kate Moss and her hubby, followed by some heavy boozing under the disapproving eyes of my two children and their mother. Aix is a beautiful old town with many parts still unspoiled, but it gets crowded over the weekend. I stayed on my boat in Marseilles and really enjoyed myself ...
