Attendees listened intently and cheered her to the rafters. She got a cool million for an hour-long speech, which is more than Boris or Blair could ever hope for. And it wasn’t even her specialty—she’s an ecdysiast—but during the recent Hedge Fund Week in Miami, Kim Kardashian was the star speaker. It tells me all I want to know about hedge fund managers, as I had a good teacher long ago, one John Bryan of toe-sucking ...

GSTAAD—As everyone knows, snobbery is nothing but bad manners passing itself off as good taste. Past American society dames were terrible snobs, until they met their French and British counterparts who put them in their place. I’m not going to mention any names because most of them are dead, but looking around me up here in the Alps I’ve seen some new horrors, money snobs who make the older type look like nuns. Mind you, ...

GSTAAD—There is nothing much I can add to what Daniel Johnson and Charles Moore wrote about the great Paul Johnson, except that I shall miss his annual summer visits to Gstaad, where we walked for hours on mountain trails and I had the opportunity to take in some of his best bons mots. He knew everything and could tell a story like no one. The times Lady Carla was with us—she is Italian and never draws a breath—Paul would ...

Norman Mailer was born on January 31, 1923, and as his hundredth birthday approaches there is a major revival of interest among those who can still read. Norman died in 2007, aged 84, and his first-born son, Michael, a talented film director who has since become my closest friend, came over to my house that day in a slight state of shock. I was his father’s friend and admirer, so we sat down and drank the day and night away. ...

Shot in the once upon a time city of dreams, now of nightmares, the sweeping solipsism expressed made paranoia a kind of totalizing faith. Behind the nauseating self-promotion a so-called prince and his Hollywood moll hogged the headlines. Far, far east from there lay a dead man, one who had absolutely nothing in common with the self-absorbed, egoistic, and narcissistic Englishman; to the contrary, King Constantine II went to ...

GSTAAD—Living my life in person is not a redundancy of expression, but it actually means living without social media. Why have I chosen the unplugged life? That’s an easy one to answer, but first a little history: I think I was the last one to switch to writing on a word processor when I founded the precursor of Takimag as an insert in a New York weekly called Taki’s Top Drawer. The Bagel weekly was the N.Y. Press, and it ...

Talismans from the past are rare but are still around, especially at the old Post Hotel: Faded bleached photographs of horse-drawn sleds on Main Street, long-bearded peasants chopping wood on the Eggli, even skiers walking up mountains in knee-deep snow before ski lifts were invented. Is there anything more precious than old photographs? Killjoy contemporary conversation subjects like the size of indoor chalet swimming pools, ...

It’s nice to be back in good old Helvetia again, but as the holiest of holy days approaches, I cannot help but think of my friend Jeremy Clarke and his struggles. Philosophers have dealt with life’s problems starting with the Greeks, yet not one of them was able to pin down man’s ultimate defeat: death, that is. The one who did manage it was no philosopher, just a simple carpenter, and his take on it has given more ...

If I had one wish to be fulfilled this Christmas it would not even be Lily James and Keira Knightley abducting me for a 24-hour love session, but for every U.S. Marine guarding our nation’s embassies to put down their guns and declare a 48-hour strike against the rotten regime in D.C. that chose a black lesbian drug smuggler over an American ex-Marine rotting in a Russian jail since 2018. The black lesbian basketball player ...

NEW YORK—It’s party time in the Bagel, and also the last week I’ll be spending in this unrefined place. The Bagel has lost its je ne sais quoi for me. It is now as subtle as a knocked-out Russian T-72 stuck in the mud. There’s as much wit around here as there used to be virgins in Hollywood, when the great Oscar Levant referred to Elizabeth Taylor’s numerous marriages as “Always a bride, never a bridesmaid.” Or as ...

Why bother with something true to life, dignified, and classy when you can create something untrue, cheap, and vulgar? While surfing through some channels looking for a black-and-white oldie, I watched something that I think is called Rogue Heroes. I’m not sure of the title because the TV film annoyed me so, I turned it off after watching it for less than ten minutes. And it took as long as that because the trash was based on ...

In these willfully ignorant times, the powers that be seem, in their haste to be politically correct, to forget that America fought its bloodiest war to end human bondage. Almost three-quarters of a million men died, yet the Civil War is being refought with fact-purging propaganda that makes cartoon villains of great American soldiers, while one group of citizens is robbed of their heritage in order to please another. About ...

NEW YORK—Christmas partying, like Yule shopping displays, begins much earlier of late. After the lockdown, however, the urge to party and party hard is justified. Like others, I am trying to make up for the missing two years, but the hangover toll is prohibitive. It now takes a whole two days to feel normal again, and at this point in my life, days count as much as months used to. Last week I hit a hot new club here on the ...

The LNG king, Peter Livanos, an old good friend, has sent me a very informative write-up about China. Peter knows as much as anyone what’s cooking behind what used to be known as the Bamboo Curtain, and he’s clued me in about China when I’ve been wrong in the past. But for any of you unfamiliar with shipping terms, LNG stands for liquid natural gas, something that costs a hell of a lot to carry over water. As a result, ...

NEW YORK—An American hack who used to write okay stuff until his left-wing employer signaled to him that activism is more important than journalism recently revealed that Americans are unhappier now than they’ve ever been before. Especially in places that voted for the Donald. According to the hack, Trump got the most votes in places where people felt the unhappiest. But that makes sense, doesn’t it? Don’t people vote ...

There are famous heroes and then there are unsung ones, and I basically prefer the latter as I have known a few of them in my lifetime. The funny thing is, I grew up learning only about famous heroes, the ancient Greek type, starting with the semi-god Achilles. Homer didn’t deal with unsung ones; everyone was larger than life, and there were only winners and losers. The person I will tell you about this week would not have ...