The “fin de saison” feeling is like the end of term in boarding school. Bittersweet. At school one was cocooned from the big bad outside world, here in Gstaad, far from the crowds and bustle, one has time to ponder the melting snows and dream about one’s youth. Closing day at the Eagle club was fun. At the Taki Cup presentation—the overall winner and new record holder was John Taki, in 36 minutes—I reminded the ...

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote “that there are no second acts in American lives.” In his particular case poor Scott was right. He died broke and forgotten in his early forties, but at least he expired in his lover’s arms, the beautiful Miss Graham, who went on to become a powerful gossip columnist in Hollywood’s hay day. I thought of second acts the other day when reading an interview of Kimberly Quinn, the ...

Gstaad. A lovely liquid lunch in a mountain hut with my friend Nicola Anouilh after two hard runs. Blue skies, gentle winds, a few puffs of white cloud, and the sound of bells from the nearby cow shed. If there’s a better way of communing with nature, I haven’t come across it yet. The natural beauty of the Alps is unspoiled and majestically alluring.  White wine helps one dream and feel at peace with the world, until, ...

Gstaad. When I spoke with the mayor of Gstaad, as well as some other local stalwarts, they all assured me that they are ready for any invasion by the Libyans, and are confident they will kick the towels back into the Mediterranean where they came from. For any of you who might have missed it due to Gordon Brown’s bullying shenanigans, or John Terry’s, or even that David Cameron is close to blowing it, here is the latest: ...

Greece is a country that thrives on rumor. Hearsay has been a part of the Greek DNA since time immemorial. Even Plato remarked on it. Demagogues used rumor and gossip to silence their opponents, demagogism being a Greek word, after all. Greeks also thrive on the spoken word. As was the case of their ancestors, the power of the spoken word sometime drives out reason. As I write, I hear a lot of my fellow Greeks say some very ...

St. Moritz. As they used to say in Flatbush, I shoulda stood in bed.  So leaving the pretty village of Gstaad on a sunny Tuesday morning, I set out for St. Moritz to attend the annual general meeting of Pugs Club and to participate in the first Pugs uphill ski race on the new course laid out by our President Professor William H. Gimlet. As the prof has only recently learned to ski—ironically there are no skiing lessons ...

Bravo Goldman Sachs. You’ve done it again. As in the U.S. subprime crisis,  this house of ill repute created a deal which helped the Greeks obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers, then charged the Greeks hundreds of millions of Euros for helping them hide the debts.  Classic Goldman Sachs policy, says the great economist Taki, the house of shame having been and being as I write the poster boy for banks ...

Thirty-nine years ago this spring I was in Vietnam, busy sending non-stop dispatches back home about how well the war was going for the good guys. When a year later the North Vietnamese took Quang Tri in the north and were about to attack Hue, Bill Buckley send me a cable asking for one thousand words on whether Hue could hold out this time. In 1968 the old imperial city had fallen to the Viet Cong and every priest, doctor, and ...

I often wonder as to why people are shocked, shocked—Captain Renault-like—to discover that modern football is a malodorous cesspit teeming with leeches and crooks, or that Tony Blair is a congenital liar not worthy of any position except that of orderly in a prison gym. The latest shock is the discovery that Jacob Zuma, the president of South Africa, has fathered his 20th child. Unlike football players, owners of ...

“It was a dark and stormy night, but we were young and thought we could do anything. There was no looking back. None of that David Copperfield kind of nonsense. We were already men. We had our finger on what was going on between self and culture. We did away with the traditional architecture of the short story. It was bull—-t, so we dumped it. There was no beginning and no middle, just a lot of emotion, irony and mood. ...

Reading good books is like making love. Reading bad ones is like masturbating. I’ve just read three good ones, one of which got on my nerves because it was about a homosexualist, as opposed to a homosexual. Which in fact the other two were about. Now if someone had suggested to me long ago that I would be reading three books about three men who preferred their own sex, I’d have said they’ve been puffing on the magic ...

Gstaad. I went to a wonderful party, three days of a non-stop feast, although not at the Palace, the mere hoi polloi were excluded, in theory at least. There wasn’t a sign of Kate or a Mick, they must have forgotten the date, actually they were not invited, but Topper (whom no one could say is a pleb—well bred is his motto, or is it well fed?) was there, as was Freddy, and Minnie, and Lolly and Bunny and George, I ...

I suppose it’s a kind of solace during these snowy times that Norway, the country with the world’s highest per capita income, has not missed a single working day through inclement weather, and as I write there are thirty feet of snow covering the country. In some areas there is much more than thirty feet of the white stuff, yet the bars are packed at night with people who have put in a hard day’s work and wish to relax. ...

Arnold Toynbee read Spengler’s The Decline of the West as a young historian at the University of London and had the same reaction I did when I first read Hemingway. It blew his mind. He found it both exhilarating and dismaying. Exhilarating because of its historical insights, dismaying for it disposed of the questions he was formulating in his mind about the West and its culture. He nevertheless went on to write A Study of ...

Let’s start 2010 right and mention a few honest people in the news… I wrote this sentence a couple of hours ago, not realizing how difficult it was going to be to find even one honest boldfaced name. Like old Diogenes, I am still looking as my deadline nears. Which reminds me: The white-bearded old Greek at least had a trademark lamp to help him in his search, something I refuse to carry as it gets in the way, especially ...

Historically, at least in America, people who seek to thrive in the theatre, publishing, finance, media, or even the gossip columns, make their way to Manhattan. Once here, the climb begins, and it’s tougher than any mountain in Nepal. As E.B. White, the great Big Bagel chronicler wrote, “all it takes is a willingness to be lucky.” But first one must get through the velvet rope. I was kept out until 1978, when Clay ...