NEW YORK—Ah, finally in New York, the city of superlatives, as they say, the most diverse metropolis ever. I suppose no one has ever said it better than Jan Morris in her luminous “Manhattan 45,” a title the author chose because it sounds “partly like a kind of gun, and partly like champagne.” Here she is right off the bat, in her prologue: “Untouched by the war the men had left behind them, they stood there ...

So, one more winter season is kaput, the best snow conditions in 50 years gone the way of all things. Like the song says, referring to a girl, every time I say goodbye to the Alps, or to the Med six months later, I die a little. Mind you, the sea is feminine, especially in her rages, but the mountains are as masculine as they come, majestic, dangerous and permanent. This has been the Madoff season, and I didn’t make any new ...

It’s past midway in March and the slopes still don’t have that used-up look which comes by the end of February. No gritty slush, just beautiful pure powder tracked only by furry things such as foxes and deer. While out cross-country skiing, I feel elated by animal tracks next to my own, a great silence enveloping the bowl where I’m skiing, without a human in sight. It could be Russia, with giant pines lining my ...

I’ve said it before and will say it again: Fear of the smear is the Israeli lobby’s chief weapon. Here’s Charles Freeman Jr’s., Obama’s choice for a major intelligence post, reasons for dropping out: “The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of ...

Thirty years ago this week my daughter was three and my son had not been born. I had left Gstaad for gloomy, strike-ridden, non-stop power cuts London, and the mother of my children was peeved at me as I had begun circling the daughter of the Belgian ambassador to the Court of St James. The Speccie was selling 7,000 copies, the New Statesman 70,000, and Jim Callaghan was asking the press what crisis they were banging on about. ...

Vassilis Paleokostas is the Arsène Lupin of the Olive Republic, aka Hellas or Greece. He is by profession a bank robber, known for his impeccable manners but unfortunate jowly, plebeian looks. He is 42 years of age, a ladies’ man, and Greece’s most wanted man. Three years ago, Vassilis managed a daring escape from the high-security Korydallos prison of Piraeus via helicopter. The chopper landed in the exercise yard, ...

Nicola Anouilh is the only son of the great French playwright Jean Anouilh—more than 70 plays, including Antigone, Becket and La Sauvage—and a close friend since Paris in the Sixties. He was of a generation just below mine, one that managed to get into Jimmy’s only during the events of May 1968, when the French bourgeoisie ran off to the south, some of their places on the banquette taken by François de Caraman, my ...

At Easter 1215, a young Tuscan married woman innocently flirted in public with a man not her husband. He flirted back just as innocently, and then things got out of hand. A vendetta was declared between Guelf and Gibel, two rival brothers of Pistoia, that resulted in extreme violence, the splitting of Guelf factions into Whites and Blacks with ensuing massacres, 1,400 houses in the middle of Florence burnt, and a feud that ...

Last week I ventured down to Geneva for a meeting with my banker, a gentleman of the old school who did not get carried away by Bernie Madoff’s siren songs. To the contrary, he went as far as Odysseus, tied himself to his desk and plugged up the ears of his underlings. Metaphorically, that is. He had some interesting things to say. The mega-crook and fraudster never met suckers in person, except for those—mostly ...

A single plug by Sir Roger Moore late last year has turned me into a Papa Hemingway-like literary hero. In his Proust questionnaire in Vanity Fair, Sir Roger was asked to list his favourite writers. Poor little me was mentioned among some good ones and, presto, you’d think I’d written The Catcher in the Rye, Tender Is the Night, A Moveable Feast, The Sun Also Rises, as well as The Red and the Black. People I have never ...

GSTAAD—If someone bet that The Spectator issue of 10 January outsold or was read by more people than any other weekly — and that includes best selling popular crap like Hello! and OK! — they’d be collecting their winnings as I write. This, of course, in the Bernese Oberland region of Switzerland, where Gstaad lies. I suppose it had to do with something concerning the Madoff gang, most of whom live around these ...

So what’s a few hundred dead Palestinian children when Tzipi and Ehud have gained eight to ten points in the polls? They were terrorist babies, anyway. So what if the Egyptians and Saudis are ignoring them while spending millions on hookers, palaces and yachts? The Gazans don’t deserve such goodies, certainly not palaces on the Riviera. My favourite is Yigal Palmor, an Israeli spokesman, who took umbrage when Cardinal ...

When Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet committed suicide just before Christmas, I hoped against hope that others would do the same. No such luck. Villehuchet was an aristocrat, a gentleman and an honest man. He felt responsible for the loss of $1.4 billion and he took the honourable way out. I did not know Villehuchet but people who did have spoken very highly of him. The rest of Madoff’s gang I do know, and they are as likely ...

Israel can now safely be called the Bernie Madoff of countries, at it has lied to the world about its intentions, stolen Palestinian lands continuously since 1948, and managed to do all this with American tax payer’s money. Every American taxpayer, starting with George W. Bush, has Palestinian blood on their hands thanks to the butchers that run Israel.      Sderot, where a few homemade harmless missiles ...

While Gaza is being bombarded by American-made F-16’s, here’s some food for thought: During the German occupation of Greece, the occupiers posted the following rules: If any German soldier was found murdered, 10 Greeks would immediately be rounded up at random and executed; if there was a repetition, the number would go up to 100. This draconian measure was not put into effect until the very end of the occupation in ...

A recent profile on Leonard Bernstein in a New York magazine brought back memories. The Bernstein piece was obviously a hagiography, written by someone who certainly knows his music but who allowed “Lenny’s” celebrity to overshadow his common sense. Bernstein was certainly musical, but he was shallow as a composer, vain in his conducting, a terrible show off when it came to social interaction, a promiscuous homosexual ...