“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 ...

A recent article in a glossy magazine about the rich and famous mentioned a $35 million house in Malibu, California, whose neighbors include the actor Mel Gibson and the singer Britney Spears. The owner of this mega-monument to good taste and inconspicuous consumption turns out to be one Teodor Nguema Obiang, son of a man who goes by the same name with the tongue-twisting Mbasogo thrown in to tell them apart. Obiang junior is ...

The hysteria over Tiger Woods is simply wonderful.  Unlike Bill Clinton’s tarts, Tiger’s are a tiny bit better quality, which is not saying much. The prettiest of the lot, Rachel Uchitel, is something else. This is hard for me to admit, but she was at school with my daughter and I had actually noticed her and had said something to my little girl about her. (“Daddy, stop it..”)  Rachel’s best friend was also ...

When the Marx Brothers announced in 1946 that their upcoming film was called A Night in Casablanca, Warner Bros threatened to sue for breach of copyright. Warner had produced the great hit “Casablanca” four years earlier, and insisted the funny men were trying to cash in on it. But Groucho was no slouch. He had his lawyer threaten Warner Brothers with breach of copyright for using the word brothers. The Marx boys won, as ...

The fourth and last time I debated at the Oxford Union was three or four years ago, and it was a total disaster. The motion was that Katrina’s aftermath was Bush’s fault, and I was against it. A quarter of a century before that, Auberon Waugh and I had wiped out the opposition under the leadership of a very young—in his twenties—Charles Moore. Another victory followed some years later, but the subject escapes me ...

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS—It’s good to be in Texas. To a European like me, Texas is why we came to America. It’s a huge state, but more important, it’s a state of mind. It is a fount of freedom and imagination. For most of the inhabitants of America’s two coasts, Texas is worse than flyover country. Texas represents everything they hate about America: Texas is big, loud, white, Republican, Christian; it produces fossil ...

NEW YORK—At an outdoor luncheon party in Sussex celebrating Willy Shawcross’s birthday some years ago, I asked his then 95-year-old father whom did he find the most interesting man at Nuremberg. “Goring,” was the monosyllabic reply. “I mean from both sides,” I said. “Goring,” said Lord Shawcross. He later told me how the Nazi would catch the American prosecutor Jackson in some howler, correct him, then smile ...

NEW YORK—One felt the backlash against the BNP–BBC fiasco all the way to the Big Bagel, with local papers commenting on the lynching of Nick Griffin by rent-a-crowd minorities. Even people who think England is in Canada heard about it and called the freak show unfair and stage-managed, confirming the perception that Britain is a nation that has totally lost its way. Personally, I wasn’t surprised in the least. ...

NEW YORK—Something’s bothering me about the Polanski business. No, unlike Harvey Weinstein and Bernard-Henri Lévy—not to mention that Mitterrand paedophile—I will not defend Roman’s actions with a 13-year-old, but I will say that, with friends like his making fools of themselves defending him, it will be a miracle if he gets off with a slap on the wrist. Although this may sound pompous, I doubt if any of his ...

When A Moveable Feast was published in 1964, I had been living in Paris for six years. I was 27 and in love with Papa Hemingway’s favorite city, one that he described as “a mistress who always has new lovers.” One didn’t speak this way back then, but the book really blew my mind. Totally. Papa had died three years before that, and reading his obituaries, I had decided to follow the writing life, despite the fact that I ...