The Return of Greece

ATHENS—This ancient city without tourists reminds me of the Athens I once knew and loved, but for the hideous ’60s modern buildings that defaced its beauty like plastic ...

The Mourning After

The lockdown and its enforced boredom have been replaced by a consistent feeling of loss, my nephew by marriage Hansie Schoenburg, age 33, from a brain tumor, and my close friend ...

Death of a Nation

Apple pie, farms, local movie theaters, pickup baseball games, swimming holes, volunteer firemen, and small libraries with very old lady librarians: an America soon to be gone ...

An Uphill Battle

GSTAAD—A friend of mine who lives here wants to start a literary festival and asked me if I had some advice for him. He’s a nice fellow and very friendly with my daughter, but ...

Roman Polanski

Q and A-holes

GSTAAD—I thought of Nietzsche while the mayhem and destruction of monuments were going on, and his dictum of strengthening the strong and paralyzing the weak as a means of ...

Madness Is Contagious

GSTAAD—Oh, to be in America, where cultural decay and self-destruction compete equally with hyperfeminist and anti-racist agendas. Gone With the Wind is suddenly as popular as ...

Vienna, Austria

Waltzing With Taki

VIENNA—Somebody once described Vienna as a top opera performed by understudies. The remark was unquestionably witty, but utterly false back when it was made. It is perfectly ...

Tyrol, Austria

Papou Was a Rolling Stone

AUSTRIA—I finally understand what’s wrong with the modern world: motorways! These dehumanizing slabs of asphalt lining our continents are Prometheus-like chains luring us to ...

Baby Talk and Bad Language

GSTAAD—Well, Theodora did not wait and I missed yet another grandchild’s birth. (The prettiest little blue-eyed thing ever, if I say so myself.) Funny thing is, I’ve never ...

Greetings From Slobovia

GSTAAD—The staff is back and all is well, as they used to say long ago in faraway places. The gardener and the cleaner are Portuguese, and they greet me with their inherent ...

Another Pandemic

GSTAAD—Hippocrates is known as the father of Western medicine, and he diagnosed and named the disease “micropoulaki” during the Periclean period, around 430 BC. He did not ...

The China Syndrome

GSTAAD—Two years or so ago I had back-to-back New York luncheons with Steve Bannon, and boy, did some of his predictions and fears ever come true! Bannon’s White House days as ...

Lady Prue Penn

From Great Boredom Come Great Tales

When indolence becomes intolerable, remembrances of things past become a lifesaver. Charles Moore’s recent Spectator notes also helped; for example, his stories about the ...

The Hustle Is On

The front page of the New York Post on the 20th of April, 2020, said it all: a large crowd in front of a Brooklyn barbershop being dispersed by police after a riotous party. There ...

Scenes From a Quarantine

So the days dwindle down, September, November... This once-peaceful alpine town is packed with rich refugees fleeing the you-know-what from nearby cities crammed with real ...

Hellenic Panic

Aristophanes was a comic genius before the Marx Brothers, but he also gave good advice to the Athenians: Stop the war! In his play Lysistrata he had the women going on strike—no ...


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