On board s/y Bushido. “ Trimming the Jib” is a short story by Ernest Hemingway and it has to do with the sea. And love. And passion. He wrote it shortly before “The Old Man and the Sea,” which helped land him the Nobel Prize for literature. Here it is in its entirety: “He ran aground on the same reef as before. Pablo was drunk and dreaming of Conchita. He was always dreaming of Conchita. When he wasn’t dreaming ...
Athens. As everyone knows, Sigmund Freud was a fraud, and like many frauds he thought the Parthenon might also be one. But he summoned his nerve and visited the sacred sight and was delighted as well as shocked at what he saw. This was 1904. Like other visitors Freud dreaded that the real thing might not live up to his expectations, but it did and continues to do so today. Unlike other cultural icons—the Mona Lisa, the ...
Which evokes a romantic memory better, a fragrance or a melody? The latter, I am sure, despite the times I’ve felt a tug at my heart when some sweet young thing breezed by me followed by the aroma of Chanel no 5, the favorite scent of my first great love back in the fifties. Music and lyrics are a hell of a combination for nostalgia nuts like myself. In fact they are as lethal as a left-right combination from the great Ray ...
My last week in London felt like end of school term, bittersweet. I was glad to be flying off to the sun, but sad to leave good friends and very good times behind. Mind you, the last night following the Speccie summer party descended into farce when my Low Life colleague and I were photographed at 5 a.m. having a spirited discussion about the human condition. Jeremy wrote about it last week but he chose to forget certain ...
Mykonos. Lying northward of the sacred island of Delos, Mykonos is as profane as it gets. Largely barren, it used to be a brothel during ancient times, or so Herodotus tells us, and it continues its erotic, carnal ways as the mecca of gay and lesbian love. Sir Elton and lady John were just here, received like royalty by the gay community which is comprised mostly of foreigners. The locals are very liberal in their acceptance ...
My last week in London and it is just as well. One more would most likely kill me. The least frantic night was the one that Simon Phillips and Roger Moore threw in Harry’s Bar for Unicef, as worthy a charity as there is, following “Masterpiece” at the former Chelsea Barracks. I sat next to Britt Ekland, still sexy and still working, but my high moment was finally meeting Sir Roger’s youngest son, Christian. Many ...
During my book party one month ago—rather surprisingly, the thing is selling well—I spotted Ferdinand Mount in the crowd and asked him to meet a friend of mine. Ferdie recognized the name immediately. “You brought cheer to the plains of India,” he told Naresh Kumar, quoting a headline of more than fifty years ago. Mount then went on to quote from one of his own dispatches: “As the shadows ...
Is there anything worse than listening to those hucksters in South Africa going bananas over the ugly game called football? Modern society is dominated by emotion and propaganda, not to mention profit, and when all three are combined what we get is the World Cup. Technicolor pictures of fat men and women jumping up and down while blowing into a contraption called vuvuzela dominate the front pages, as if an order had come from ...
The Greco-Roman egghead view was that events do not occur at random according to the whims of the Gods, but according to a repetitive cycle. Just as life followed birth and death followed decline, monarchy decayed into tyranny, leading to aristocracy, which decayed into oligarchy, which led in turn to selective democracy, followed by anarchy and finally back to monarchy. However one looks at it, it all begins and ends with ...
It’s a topsy-turvy world when the deputy editor of the Spectator, a lady, is in Afghanistan, while the high life correspondent of the same magazine cowers in a Belgravia basement wearing full body armor and his Wehrmacht helmet. Obviously it should be the other way round, but now it’s a women’s world and we men have been put out to pasture. And it gets worse. Apparently, while about to go out “in the ...
On board S/Y Bushido off St. Tropez. My book party’s best line was Claus von Bulow’s, as told to Antony Beevor, Piers Paul Read, Paul Johnson, and Sir V.S. Naipaul, among the literary worthies who took the time to attend the poor little Greek boy’s launch at Brooks’s. “The last book party I attended,” said Claus, “was that of Leni Riefenstall’s about fifteen years ago. I had with me an Israeli ...
The block I’ve lived on these past 35 years is next to what no less a Manhattan authority like Woody Allen has called the most beautiful street in the city. This time of year the elms and poplar trees give my block a country feeling, which for me is as good as it gets. Country living in a city is what it’s all about. An English writer once described the place as being without trees, “but as if by a miracle little ...
As I write, the political situation in Britain has many of her citizens bewildered. Despite the staggering deficits and economic shocks, the good people of Britain voted with their hearts rather than their heads. Not being a medium, I will not try and predict what will happen. My advice to loyal Spectator readers is to go to Fitzdares and place some bets. (I sold my shares in Fitzdares with profit last year.) What I do know for ...
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Let me take you away from politics for a bit, and bring you down here to Myrtle Beach, a down market Miami Beach but with much nicer and friendlier locals. There is even a Hemingway street—Papa came fishing around here—which would never happen in Miami. Only porn stars and drug dealers have streets named after them in that sweaty Sodom and Gomorrah, although the city did once allow ...
New York. It’s up early every day before 8 a.m. and a brisk walk through the park before breakfast on the way to judo practice. A pale green washes the fields, daffodils pushing through the crusty earth. The joggers are out in force, young Jewish princesses struggling while getting in shape for serious Bloomingdale’s shopping in the afternoon. The U.S. nationals are this weekend and I’ve been behaving myself. I now get ...
New York. April in the Bagel is as good as it gets. The girls are back in their summer dresses, people are crowding the outdoor cafes, and Central Park is an explosion of greens and pinks. Spring, as the song says, is busting out all over. And the taxman cometh—but not for 41 percent of NYers. Last week, on tax day, it was revealed that an eye popping 41 percent of the state’s filers did not pay any federal income tax ...
