Having sat on a boat for the last five weeks, I’ve had plenty of time to reflect, and reflect I did. Getting old tends to make one look back, nostaligize for that green light of the dock, and, of course,  the great F.Scott Fitzgerald himself. Yes, he was the master of evoking the grand old days, when Gatsby boys wore white ducks and ran around in open cars, their gals flighty, their hair not yet up, all giggly in ...

Just after the Berlin wall came down, I flew to Berlin with my German-Austrian wife and traveled around the city and its eastern parts. On visiting the Olympic stadium I told the taxi driver that my uncle, a hurdler, was the first athlete the Führer’s gaze fell upon as the parade of the 1936 games began, because we Greeks always go in first, having started the games back in 776 B.C., and because my uncle was the flag ...

Around 15 years or so ago, I was fast asleep late in the morning when I got an ear-splitting telephone call from Greece. It was Vicki Woods, a Telegraph writer, and she sounded anxious. If memory serves, and it does because she wrote a subsequent piece about it which made it in “The Week,” the conversation went as follows: “Oh hello, my name’s Vicky Woods, we’ve met a couple of times….ah at the ...

    “Belgium agrees to Holocaust restitution,” cries a New York Times headline on March 12. This is good news ... except that I was unaware that Belgium had been on the Nazi side 68 years ago. The piece goes on to clarify that campaigners welcomed the decision to compensate those whose propery and gold in Belgium had been looted by Nazi occupiers. But why should occupied Belgium be made to pay? ...

Admiral Fallon resigns as any honest man, and an admirable soldier, because he realizes that the Cheney-neocon network is still at work. We are at best hoping for a holding action in Afghanistan, and the same in Iraq, yet the madmen of the administration believe they can still pull a rabbit out of their hat before next November. Back in New York, a blackmailing bully who has studied Hollywood movies on how to act tough, drags ...

“And so the blood-drenched cycle begins again, each side convinced that it has no option but to make the other suffer.” This from a London Daily Telegraph >editorial. What my favorite London paper did not write about the latest outrage in Israel is that there is an option, and it is in Israel’s corner. The Jerusalem religious college that was attacked last week is the ideological heart of Israel’s ...

“The Steamroller,” as he liked to call himself, sure rolled over the poor prostitute—petite and only 105 pounds—in Washington D.C. I do not suffer from Schadenfreude, but in Spitzer’s case, I will make an exception. The guy’s the phoniest of all the phonies ever to hold public office. He went after innocent people, ruined names and reputations for no reason except to serve his own, and would ...

Gstaad is a very chic place and, alas, getting chicer by the minute as the nouveaux riche Russians and oily kleptocratic Arabs are closing in. Thinking about the way our alpine village used to be, I’m reminded of the time I spent here with Bill Buckley and what he represented when he came on the American political scene—a fresh voice full of promise, and an educated and cultured one at that. I’ve written a memoir of ...

When I wrote Pat Buckley’s obituary last spring, I had a pretty good idea that Bill would follow her sooner rather than later. I happened to be with him the day she died, along with his brother James and sister Priscilla, and I was taken aback by Bill’s unembarrassed weeping. At her memorial service at the Met, he was more in control, but one could tell that he no longer wished to live. I often went up to Stamford ...

That phony story about John McCain and Vicky Iseman, which the New York Times ballyhooed as an “exclusive,” is so typical of the Old Bag. But Bill Keller’s (the executive editor of the Times) response, that he stands by the story and the rest of the bull, brought back memories. During the ’80s in London, one of the town’s most…er…shall we say receptive-to-male-charms young woman was one Emma Gilbey, a ...

Here is good news. For any of you out there nostalgic for the lovable extra terrestrial, NASA is beaming out songs into deep space trying to lure anything that might be out there to our shores. The bad news is that scientists warn that transmitting songs could put the earth at risk of an alien attack--If some terrestrial hears the lyrics of a rapper, or listens to the boring tunes of the Beatles, our goose is cooked. Here's a ...

I knew that this administration makes the gang that couldn’t shoot straight look like criminal geniuses, but I never realized just how dumb the Bush-Cheney gang truly is. When I saw Bush announce that Uncle Sam has recognized Kosovo, it reminded me of those moronic Englishmen who had seen the murderous Stalin in action against his own people who had returned home and told the world they had “been over into the future ...

It all began when PM Constantine Karamanlis named his old friend Mr. Zachopoulos as the general secretary of the Ministry of Culture. Zachopoulos, a fatty and rather short even for a Greek, was married, but began an affair with his secretary once ensconced in his powerful role. The secretary, too, was a fatty, so it was a natural, as they say in Hollywood. But then something happened, and the secretary decided to videotape ...

His original name was Battenberg, but his great uncle changed it to Mountbatten and his grandfather to Windsor. He is now Andrew Windsor, and his royal title is HRH Prince Andrew. He is the Queen of England’s second son, a spoiled, rather thick, toothy, and overweight golf fanatic whose wife ran off with an American “financial adviser” who was photographed sucking her toes in St. Tropez 15 years or so ago. He and ...

Back in 2004, traditional conservatives were faced with navigating between a Charybdis and a Scylla by the names of Bush and Kerry. On one side lurked something quite monstrous: a self-described conservative who fiddled as the federal government grew to obscene proportions and who allowed sofa-samurai with names like Wolfowitz, Perle, and Kristol to talk him into an unending occupation of Babylon. On the other side swirled the ...

I never thought I'd see the day where I would agree with anything Ted Kennedy had to say, but he hit the nail on the head when he finally admitted that the Clintons—because we will have a dual presidency if that woman gets elected—are not only demonizers of their opponents—any opponent, even if our Lord Jesus came down and decided to run—but also have a propensity to lie even when the truth serves them ...