I first met Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor in the summer of 1977 in Corfu. I was onboard Gianni Agnelli’s boat, and the charismatic Fiat chairman asked me to go ashore and bring “a very smart Englishman whose ancient Greek is much better than yours.” I knew “Paddy,” as everyone called him, by sight, because among us Greeks he was on a par with our ancient heroes. Leigh Fermor was not only famous for his books on ...
ISLE OF ISCHIA—On a bright, windy June morning this beautiful island’s church bells rang out to welcome the most ostentatious concourse of sailing boats to have arrived at its shores since Commodore Thomas Troubridge sailed into the bay of San Angelo in 1799. Troubridge, dispatched by Lord Nelson to quell an island revolt, had brought great distinction to the family. They upheld that distinction for 200 years until in a ...
FRANKFURT—The worst part is the weigh-in: Hundreds of heavily muscled, cauliflower-eared, tattooed, menacing-looking sweaty men from Mongolia, Korea, Japan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Greece, Germany, Brazil, Canada, France, Hungary, the US—you name it—wait patiently and silently to step on the scales. Everyone holds his passport, which he is required to show once on the scales. It is a funny ...
Here’s the scoop on poor old Hellas, that sad little EU country given a temporary reprieve from being hauled to the municipal dump: Greece will default sometime in 2012. If there are any doubters around, this prediction comes from the great oracle of economics Taki, the very same Taki who smelled a rat even before the Greek government was caught red-handed cooking the books under the advice of the poisonous giant squid, ...
NEW YORK—Summertime, and as the song tells us, “the livin’ is easy.” The temperature is in the nineties, girls’ dresses are at their flimsiest, love is in the air, and sex is everywhere—what else can one wish for? This is my last week in the Bagel, and as always I am reluctant to leave. I’ve trained diligently, played less hard than usual, read a lot, and even managed to identify cedars, poplars, willows, and ...
In that wonderful old Broadway musical Guys and Dolls, gambler Sky Masterson is romancing the Salvation Army’s Sister Sarah Brown after an all-nighter of boozing it up in Havana. Walking Sarah home to her mission in New York, he tells her that “Only in Times Square does the dawn get turned on by an electrician.” She swoons. Those were the good old days, when Runyonesque characters such as Nathan Detroit, ...
Israel " Palestine " President Obama finally articulated last night what we"ve been waiting for since his election in 2008: Israel has to retreat to its 1967 borders. Not surprisingly, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu not only rejected the proposal, he demanded an apology from the president. This is a fine state of affairs. The aggressor and recipient of billions of dollars from Uncle Sam demands the good uncle ...
ORLANDO—A neutron bomb hit this place just as I got off the airplane, killing all humans but leaving the buildings intact. It was a horrid, unpardonable crime, and I blame the scientists. They should have done it the other way around: Kill the buildings and save the humans, however brain-dead they are in Orlando. I knew we were in trouble the moment I deplaned. There were five of us: two competitors and three coaches. We were ...
Why would a German playboy-billionaire industrialist with a large family and lots of old and good friends have dinner in Gstaad with one of his closest buddies, then go up to his chalet and put a bullet in his ...
Some thirty years or so ago, my friend P. J. O"Rourke came to dinner at my New York house with what was then his new bride. She was beautiful, reserved, intelligent, and after dinner she called me a male-chauvinist anti-Semitic racist before leaving the house in a fury. P. J. apologized and followed his bride out. To this day I haven"t figured it out, nor has P. J. They didn"t stay married long enough for a serious ...
Mme. Nhu, who died five days before THE wedding, was a hell of a woman. When she was captured by the commies in Hue in 1946, she stood up to them until the French rescued her four months later. She was anti-French and anti-commie, yet the Western press named her the Dragon Lady, a nickname she didn’t deserve but one that stuck. She was a nationalist par excellence, but in the Vietnam War’s gathering storm, the press needed ...
Gone are the days when I used to wear a tux to go see a Broadway show. These days I feel overdressed wearing a sport coat and necktie. I used to go to Broadway a lot when I was young. My girlfriend at the time, Linda Christian, was an actress known for her romances more than her screen credits. She was once married to Tyrone Power. She loved the theater and more often than not was asked to visit the dressing rooms afterwards. ...
How fair a rule is monarchy? A Byzantine scholar wrote that it was the fairest, to the point that God sustained it, as long as the emperors were elected by the army or an aristocratic senate. With their coronation, legitimate successors and usurpers alike automatically became sacred. The ancient Greeks had gone a step further. They did not require a Godlike sustenance or perfection from their kings, only greatness. Agamemnon, ...
Tuesday last, April 12, one hundred and fifty years ago, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces fired the first shots on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The bombardment lasted 34 hours, and Fort Sumter occasionally replied with fire of its own. Then the white flag went up and the Union troops within the fort surrendered. Not a single man had a scratch on either side. It looked as if neither gang ...
Let's play the "What If?" game for a minute. What if I had written this column in October 2002 and some eagle-eyed aide to George W. Bush had noticed it and shown it to his moron boss? Had the moron read it and taken what I"m about to write into consideration, Uncle Sam might be one trillion dollars richer, thousands of our dead and maimed might still be alive and kicking, and ditto for hundreds of thousands of ...
NEW YORK—I went to see a revival of Arcadia in the beautiful Ethel Barrymore Theatre last Saturday night, and it made my day. Tom Stoppard is our greatest playwright, and I think Arcadia is his best play, although a couple of his other gems come close. I was with Marine Major Michael Warring and Marine Major Chris Meyers (Ret) and their girls. Both officers saw action in Iraq, both are extremely well educated and well read, ...
