As Good As It Gets

It’s as good as it gets; a light rain is falling on a soft May evening and I’m walking north on a silent Park Avenue hoping to get into trouble. 14,000 yellow taxis have ...

Robert Redford

The Greatest Movie Never Made

OK. Magnanimity in victory is a sine qua non among civilized men and women, so let me not be the first to rub it in. Last week I wrote that I feared the worst and felt sorry for ...

William S. Paley

The Suppression of Ideas

If any of you see Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, walking around with a begging bowl in his hand, it’s because he took me to dinner recently and I sort of went a bit ...

Clare Boothe Luce

Time Speaketh No Longer

Talk about how the mighty have fallen. Time magazine was for the better part of the 20th century the model for American newsweeklies. Its style of epigrammatic terseness and ...

Belvedere Palace, Vienna

The Worship of Bigness

A recent column in the FT had me mad as hell and not about to take it any more. The writer, Simon Kuper, calls Vienna a backwater, a bit like calling the Queen a busted flush ...

New York City

Noo Yawk, Noo Yawk

New York  - “Gimme a BLT on rye and hold da mayo” is a great Noo Yawk sound. So is boid for bird, and toerty toird for 33rd street. True working class accents no longer ...

Italian Gardens, London

Twice the Blabbering Fool

Ah Spring, the spring of our frost bitten age. At the Polish Club in London, a wonderful place studded with portraits of Polish patriots who have fought and sacrificed for the ...

Pietro Bini

Down with Modernism, up with Mozart

End of season is always bittersweet, the melting snows a bit like autumn leaves, but the days are longer and soon spring will chase any remaining winter blues away. The Eagle ...

Elton John

King of the Hill

It’s a famous quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one that Elton John should ponder, when he’s not out shopping, that is. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to ...

My Favorite Decade

Flipping through some television garbage trying to induce sleep, I came upon an old western starring Kirk Douglas, Dorothy Malone and Rock Hudson. Once upon a time the above names ...

Plaka, Athens

Athens Then and Now

Athens – I am walking on a wide pedestrian road beneath the Acropolis within 200 meters of the remaining Themistoclean wall and the ancient cemetery to eminent Athenians. One ...

Keeping in Form

The secret of eternal youth, according to Alice Longworth Roosevelt, is arrested development, and the penny dropped last week. The mountains were misty, snow was falling, and I ...

Wasserngrat Mountain, Gstaad

Say It in Style

A naked, very good-looking young man skied down the mountain, evoking shrieks of laughter and admiration from the hundred or so skiers lining the slopes. He turned out to be J.T., ...

Arnaud de Borchgrave

On the Death of a Friend


I hate to start with a cliché, but Count Arnaud de Borchgrave d’Altena, who died in Washington, D.C., last week aged 88, was the last of the great foreign correspondents, with ...

Stay the Piste!

Gstaad—Once upon a time, clergymen saw mountain peaks as natural steeples leading them ever closer to God. Doctors considered the mountains the best medicine for tuberculosis, ...

Athens, 2015

Beware of Brussels Bearing Gifts

The good news is that a Greek suppository is about to relieve the EU’s economic constipation. The bad is that there’s a Castro in our midst, posing—just like Fidel did 56 ...


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