The Greek fires which are ravaging the country may be a tragedy, but it’s a tragedy fuelled by greed. Once upon a time, Athens was the most romantic city of Europe.  Laid out and built by Bavarians—the first post-independence King was Otto of Bavaria—it was a marvel of wide boulevards, sidewalk cafes,  parks and neo-classical public buildings. I remember as a child living in the Kolonaki area, on a ...

Here’s a bagatelle, a French word denoting something unimportant, however cute. It has to do with Paul Gottfried. History has repeatedly proved that the nobility has always been better fitted for the business of ruling. Paul, mind you, is noble in his mind and behavior, which as far as I’m concerned, trumps nobility of birth.  Recently he had invited me to speak to one of his seminars—an honor—one ...

Sixty two years on, American and European commentators continue to blather on about the unwillingness of Japanese prime ministers to apologize about World War II. The Yasukuni shrine, where Japan’s 2.5 million dead soldiers are buried, has the same effect on our all-knowing ones as a man sucking a lemon in the front row of a concert has on a flutist playing Mozart. Every time a Japanese premier visits the shrine, the ...

Bankers should act like bankers, and not kebab salesmen. The latter try and sell to anyone within hearing distance. In the good old days, bankers lent money to those who could repay. When greed set in during the go-go days, they started lending to people unlikely to repay them. But there was a catch. The bankers covered themselves by selling the bad loans to others, greedier than themselves, and made a profit out of doing so. ...

Here, at last, is the Taki plan to save George W. Bush's presidency from the disaster it has been turned into by his neocon advisers. What W needs is a great big fat win which will overshadow Iraq, hog the headlines, and catapult him in the polls. The operative word is Palestine. His latest call for an international conference, one that is supposed to give birth to a contiguous Palestinian state, is a good ...

Poor President Bush. Hippias tried to betray Athens to Darius, but we Athenians took care of his plans in time. Bush failed to see the cancer on his presidency -- a severe case of hubris whose worst symptom is Iraq, a disease brought on by the Iagos with whom Bush surrounded himself. Hubris is an ancient illness, and Bush is not the first leader to suffer from ...

I must take my hat off to Tom Piatak and F.J. Sarto for the Christopher (social climber) Hitchens piece on my web site. Also the numerous readers who wrote in praising Tom for exposing probably the phoniest and most dishonest propagandist—which is very debatable in view of his catcher nights in Oxford—-around. Hitchens and I go back a long way. He used to have a nickname which some gays had given him, Robin, I ...

Speaking of terrible thoughts, I’d like to make souvlaki out of those towels who go around calling themselves princes and demand that we adhere to their primitive customs about women. The oil-rich emir of Qatar might not like his female relatives to fly next to European men who are strangers, but then he should provide them with a flying carpet, instead of holding up a plane in boiling Milano. The BA pilot was terrific in ...

Further west from Antibes and Cannes, St. Tropez has held out the longest against the invading hordes of Arabs and Russkies. The rest of the Riviera is now a sweaty, dangerous hellhole, its polluted waters matched only by the polluted kleptocrats who inhabit the place. St Tropez proper is clean and charming, its tiny cobbled streets unchanged, its bistros and places where the locals play Boule exactly the same as fifty years ...

We were about ten of us-- Nick Scott, Chantal Hanover, Tim Hoare, Richard Northcott, Bolle and Debbie Bismarck, Sir Bob Geldof and a couple of pretty young things. All sorts of loose and chesty broads were table-hopping trying to catch Saint Bob's eye. That is when I had my brainstorm. "Hello AGAIN," I would shout, and the line worked as if by magic. As everyone is more or less always stoned in St Tropez, the word again meant ...

In a city scarred forever by terror, New Yorkers could be forgiven for fearing the worst. I am referring to last Thursday’s Lexington Avenue explosion which had everyone experiencing 9/11 deja vu. Shoppers ran for cover, dodging flying rubble, while a truck was swallowed when the tarmac opened up into a giant crater. But not to worry. As everyone knows,  it was an explosion caused in an underground steam pipe. The ...

The civilisations that rose and fell on the lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea were the makers of the history I’m interested in. Screw Tahiti or the Straits of Malacca. The two great countries of the Med are Greece and Italy, and without those two countries you’d have squat today. And, I suppose, I have to bring in Egypt. Which brings me to the last point. Jihad. Post-Christian European secular elites are avoiding the ...

The extravaganza was made possible by the city which turned over some of its most historic sights to Valentino and the Oscar winning film designer Dante Ferretti, who proceeded to put up 40 classical columns illuminated from within in the ruins of the Temple of Venus, adjacent to the Coliseum. We were driven up by electric carts and then walked on red carpets into this vast space, where more than two thousand years ago ...

I rang my friend Elizabeth Stauffenberg Roberti -- her father was Claus’s brother and was also put to death after the July 20 plot -- and she did not seem too perturbed that Tom Cruise would play her uncle. “He is a foot shorter but what the hell…” My problem with Cruise is not his religion, far from it, but his mannerisms. I don’t think he is capable of playing an upper class Wehrmacht officer of noble background. It ...

One thing my grandfather taught me very long ago, when as Prime Minister of Greece he talked with the communist rebels in the mountains. Better to talk with your enemies than your friends. It is a long haul but it’s worth it. Sixty years of refusing to talk has made Israel and the United States the two most hated states in the world. Time to start ...

What I find incredible is that there are still people around who wonder why the Middle East is up in flames. Andrew Alexander explained it very well last Friday. 90 years ago Britain initiated a policy of providing a Jewish homeland in Palestine — on predominantly Arab lands. Then Israel was created on land that supposedly belonged half to the Arabs and half to the Jews. But not for the first time, the Jews took a bigger ...