An F. Scott Fitzgerald biographer by the name of David Brown refers to America’s promotion of deviancy (my words) as “the great post Appomattox launch toward materialism.” I liked that line and was thinking about it as I left the boat early morning and walked into an almost perfect Greek village square for a coffee. There were some French people blabbering away with their usual hand gestures, Greeks discussing politics in ...
PATMOS—Judging by the news, the world is finally coming apart: Chinese lab escapee Covid is still going strong, the monkeypox plague is targeting gays, record heat waves are crippling Europe and America, mass shootings are becoming a way of life in the U.S., there’s a war of attrition in the Ukraine, Taiwan is being threatened by China, and gloom and doom are everywhere but here in the holy island of Patmos, where Saint ...
I now find resorts more fun out of season. Civilized tourists are as rare as an intelligent Hollywood movie, so local talent will do nicely, and to hell with the vulgar jet set. Gstaad is perfect in June and July, March and April, as are St. Moritz, the Ionian Islands, and Patmos, my next destination. Once upon a time the French Riviera was a must, but now it’s a sweaty hellhole, a shabby place for not-so-sunny ...
Michael Beloff QC and past president of Trinity College Oxford has just had his memoir reviewed in The Spectator, and it brought back memories. Here’s this really good man, the type who does the work, believes in the system, plays by the rules, and subscribes to the old graces of courtesy and politeness, but the sort we never read about. Instead, what is shoved down our throats are today’s politicians selling their snake ...
Now that the weakest Wimbledon since 1973—the year of the boycott—is over, a few thoughts about Pam Shriver’s recent revelations that her coach Don Candy, deceased, was also her lover. Candy was 50 at the time, while Pam was 17, which in my book made Candy a lucky guy, if it was legal. The age of consent varies in places, and the only time I had to defend myself was when an irate father whose daughter I had dated and was ...
Looking back and trying to choose which among all the incomparably bewitching ones of my youth can be tricky. Giselle was definitely one of them—blond, French, mesmeric, an Aryan apparition—but so was Kiki, very white-skinned, also French, patrician, and very sexy. They were friends, those two, but fell out after they both chose the same boyfriend. And they were also married to men who knew and liked the boyfriend, but back ...
As speaker at a posh dinner given by Jonathan and Jake Goedhuis, the best U.K. wine merchants by far, and attended by many swells including Anthony Mangnall MP, I somehow managed to finish the speech despite having tasted some very good wines beforehand. I nevertheless got lots of mileage from the fact that we Greeks were responsible for inventing the strike—Lysistrata—an act the British unions later on perfected. Ancient ...
It’s nice to be back in the old continent again, especially after getting within a couple hundred yards of the phoniest bunch of Hollywood East types, fakes with names like Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff, and their ilk. It made me fly out from the Bagel without mixed feelings for a change. America has become unrecognizable, a violent land where a Democratic Congress winks at riots and intimidation by the left, where career criminals ...
He is a rich English lord with a very large house and his wife is a beautiful American with a mid-Atlantic accent. The lord is portrayed by Herbert Marshall, a screen idol of the ’30s and ’40s, his wife by Norma Shearer, a Hollywood superstar whose eyes alone enslaved men and whose figure caused me sleepless nights as a schoolboy, if you know what I mean. Then there is a suitor, Robert Montgomery, the patrician American ...
SOUTHAMPTON, L.I.—These are peripatetic times for the poor little Greek boy, out in the Hamptons for some sun-seeking among WASP types, and then down to the nation’s capital for the memorial service of that wonderful humorist P.J. O’Rourke. And do take the following with a grain of salt, but even 800 million years ago, when only microorganisms slithered around the beaches, belonging to a private club was all-important, ...
NEW YORK—Prince Pavlos, heir to the Greek throne, turned 55 recently, and I threw a small dinner for him. Pavlos is a hell of a prince, father, husband, and businessman. He’s tall, good-looking, a gent in every way, intelligent, hardworking, and has never put a foot wrong. Neither has any member of his immediate family. Compared with them, the rest of European royals seem wanting, but then I’m prejudiced. The Greek royals ...
NEW YORK—A couple more weeks in the Bagel and then on to dear old London. I’ve had a very good time partying with young friends here, but the place reeks, literally as well as metaphorically. Violence is creeping up, gangs shooting at each other even on 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, right where the poor little Greek boy grew up. Where a commemorative plaque of young Taki’s residence should have been put up long ago for ...
Douglas Murray’s opus The War on the West has just been published, and it’s a doozy. He is a friend and fellow columnist in the London Spectator, the oldest magazine in the English-speaking world. It is a book about what happens when the good guys—those on the side of democracy, reason, and rights—prematurely surrender. As he writes in his preface, “Every schoolchild now knows about slavery. How many can describe the ...
NEW YORK—Living a life of pleasure is fun, but it can also become tiresome. Living an ethical life of responsibility is beneficial to the soul, but also boring. I am stuck between the two at times, and I think age has a lot to do with it. It is a constant reminder, the very visible yoke of age, as I daily march up and down Park Avenue noticed by absolutely no one. Cross my heart, I really don’t mind, in fact it makes me ...
NEW YORK—Alexandra rang me from London to inquire about a man by the name of Klaus Schwab: “He sounds like the greatest threat of our time, should I be worried?” Nah, I answered, he’s just another smooth-talking wallet lifter, a typical smarmy Davos man. “That’s what scares me,” said the wife. For the very few of you who have not heard of Klausie baby, he is the chairman of the World Economic Forum, or WEF, a ...
NEW YORK—Back in the good old days the Carlyle hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was THE hotel for Yankee swells, rich politicians such as JFK, and, of course, upper-class Eurotrash. Both my children were born at a hospital nearby, and both newborns spent their first month of life at the hotel. Alexandra and I would leave our nearby brownstone that was more upside-down and move to the Carlyle that was more sideways, ...
