GSTAAD—Speaking in the House of Commons in 1940, Leo Amery rebuked Neville Chamberlain and his colleagues with the Oliver Cromwell quote, “In the name of God, go.” This was after the fall of France with England on the brink. Those telling Mubarak to go are on the street, not in parliament, which doesn’t exist in the way we know it. I was in Damascus back in 1970 when Hearst correspondent John Harris burst into my room ...
About fifteen years ago I received a very polite letter from Belgium asking me to list three of the most pompous and self-important people in the UK. It came with a self-addressed return envelope and stamp. The writer was known as l’entarteur, a man who would approach the pompous and vainglorious and shove a pie in their face. He would never insult the victims nor use foul language—in fact, he always remained silent—and ...
Having spent a great part of my life charting the decline of civilization, I am not surprised at the goings-on in Tunisia, especially as I never considered the place to be civilized. How apt that the arch-crook dictator Ben Ali (Baba) slithered away to Saudi Arabia, itself a beacon of democracy and human rights—especially for women—instead of landing here in good old Helvetia and embarrassing my little community of Gstaad. ...
GSTAAD—Back in 1975 Adam Ferguson, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, published a very important book with a very apt modern title, When Money Dies. It was about the Weimar hyperinflation nightmare, something our so-called leaders might well think about, which of course they will not. We are so dumbed-down by reality and talent shows on the idiot box, why bother to bring up unpleasant subjects? Only recently I read ...
GSTAAD—Six hours into the New Year, and already there was trouble. My own bash to welcome 2011 with fifty of my nearest and dearest finished around 5 a.m., so I rolled down toward the Palace hotel still looking for some action. I had a very pretty German girl in tow, my son’s friend Fiona, so I swept into the lobby in style. Then it happened. I saw the vision to end all visions and a desperate, sensuous pain, the type that ...
OK. Let’s start the new year with a politically incorrect column by telling it like it is, for a change. During the last week of November, in Portland Oregon, the F.B.I. arrested a Somali born U.S. resident as he was about to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in a public square full of mothers and children. Although the authorities were aware of it and had provided the would-be multiple murderer with phony bombs of ...
NEW YORK—This is a bad time of year for atheists. So much so, they are showing signs of desperation. In the cesspool that is Uncle Sam’s capital, an unusual Christmas message began appearing last week on the sides of buses and trains: “NO GOD?…NO PROBLEM!” Two hundred and seventy of these ads have gone up, paid for by secular groups in cities around the country. Similar signs are being placed on buses and billboards ...
This is in praise of younger men. An outrage will take place at Preston Crown Court on January 7, 2011, when beautiful 27-year-old ballet teacher Sarah Pirie will be sentenced for an “improper relationship with a 15-year-old” who was not named (unlucky chappie) for obvious reasons. In my not-so-humble opinion, this is dead wrong. If Pirie’s sentence is harsh, it will be the cruelest decision since the Athenians sent poor ...
The death of anyone well known - especially in New York - invokes more clichés than you know what draws flies in summer. Every obituary I read about Elaine included the words, "icon", "brassy", "landmark", "true New Yorker", and other such epithets. Let’s take it from the top. I was among the original clients of Elaine’s, having been taken there by Clay Felker, the great magazine ...
The irony is such that the word itself loses meaning. The ultimate Afghan con man, an oxymoron if there ever was one, is someone Hollywood couldn’t make up. A catch-him-if-you-can type of script wouldn’t make it past the first rewrite. Even “based on a true story” wouldn’t help. If it weren’t for the dead and maimed-for-life, I’d be laughing my pants off. Just as funny was the timing, at least for myself. I’d ...
NEW YORK—Actor Harvey Keitel and I are good friends and we go way back. For any of you who hate movies and Hollywood as I do, Keitel is your man. He was on Broadway for ten years and then made Mean Streets, the first of many gritty films with Robert De Niro depicting young Italian toughs around tough New York neighborhoods. De Niro and Keitel are very close friends, but the latter is a very open person, not at all shy ...
NEW YORK—Tony Judt was a very clever and learned Brit who taught in the Big Bagel and died last August from that dreaded Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was extremely brave until the end, writing and lecturing from his wheelchair—so convincingly that some nice guys banned him from speaking just before the end because of his opposition to Israeli policies. (They called him an anti-Semite although Judt was Jewish, which is par for ...
NEW YORK—This is a good time to be in the Bagel. Walking briskly under changing autumn skies amid colors that still carry their summer clothes is inspiring. Heaven knows I need it. Early morning means judo training—hangover or not—and in foggy days I walk as if in a trance through the park, longing to reach the dojo before the yellow mist envelops me. After training it’s as if a heavy load was lifted from my shoulders. ...
I began thinking about this column one week before I noticed that Craig Brown had pinched it. He had actually written what I meant to write one week before I decided to write it, which I guess cannot be called plagiarism merely because I had thought of it first. (If I had, that is.) It’s about the man who wrote Downton Abbey, the greatest and most popular soap opera since Upstairs, Downstairs. It was during a von Bülow lunch ...
Throughout his life my friend Porfirio Rubirosa made about five to ten million dollars by romancing women, and he married three of the world’s richest: Flor de Oro Trujillo, the Dominican strongman’s only daughter; Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress; and Barbara Hutton, the original “Poor Little Rich Girl.” Rubi spent money he’d earned in the bedroom on the good things in life: mostly other women, strings of polo ponies, ...
NEW YORK—It’s open season against whites over here. Couple of weeks ago, an 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate, also 18, and a female student accomplice used a webcam to surreptitiously film him in a gay sexual encounter and sent the link to Ravi’s 150 Twitter followers. Tyler Clementi’s body was fished out a week later, after the cheap laughs had subsided. ...
