Dudley House, London

Hail the Conquerors

Thick snow is falling hard and heavy, muffling sounds and turning the village from picturesque into postcard-beautiful. I am lying in bed listening to a Mozart version of “Ave ...

Jack Nicholson

There’s No Justice

I had a short chat with BBC Radio concerning the actor Jack Nicholson, whom I knew slightly during the 70s and 80s. Alas, it had to do with age, his and mine, 77 and 78 ...

A Time for Tenacity

This is a good time to write about a nation’s resilience in the face of calamity. I am referring to the stoic discipline with which the Japanese bore hardship and the death of ...

Taki’s Guide to Good Girls

Here is my Christmas gift to Takimag readers, one that applies mostly to unmarried males, but it’s also available to married ones who might wish to test whether that old magic ...

A Dearth of Characters

Except for sickness in one’s family or the loss of a life, is there anything sadder than to see a bookstore shut its doors? I used to live in a street that had three bookstores ...

Washington Square Park, New York

Elegance Is Not a Sin

The leaves are falling nonstop, like names dropped in Hollywood, and it has suddenly turned colder than the look I got from a very pretty girl in a downtown restaurant. I had gone ...

Carolina Herrera

A Special Snobbery

To the grand Herrera house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for lunch in honor of Lord and Lady Linley. David Linley is over here to receive an award for his designs, which ...

Alberto Giacometti, Chariot

The Real Deal

Aleko Goulandris is my oldest and closest friend. We met in the summer of 1945, at the Semiramis Hotel in a northern Athenian resort. The Allied bombing and the ensuing communist ...

Monica Lewinsky

Beauty and the Beast

To Newport, Rhode Island: smallest state in the Union but one of the most beautiful. Driving northeast from the Bagel there’s Long Island Sound on one’s right, and beautifully ...

Autumn in New York

Autumn in New York, they even wrote a song about it that was a great hit sixty years ago. Last weekend the sky was awash in blue, Manhattan at its best, with Central Park gleaming ...

Brad Pitt in Fury

Where Has All the Talent Gone?

I have always believed that the mission of post-Fred & Ginger movies has been to reduce, insofar as it lay within their power, the manners and morals of the community. Long ...

Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry

A Case for Nostalgia

An intelligent letter from a reader, Stanislas Yassukovich, CBE, warms my heart. It’s nice to know there are others as appalled as I am with today’s so-called elite and their ...

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Neocon Cowards and Russian Ingrates

The time-honored saying that England’s great battles have been won on the playing fields of Eton is a lot of hooey. Blücher was the real winner against Napoleon at Waterloo, ...

Not a Bad Place to Die

This is about life up high. A Brit rapscallion and mischief-maker gossip columnist, Peter McKay, recently diverted from type and wrote about how great it is to pilot a plane. ...

Queen Anne Marie and King Constantine of Greece

The Cradle of Kleptocracy

Athens—This grimy, semi-Levantine, ancient city has its beauty spots, with childhood memories indelibly attached. A turn of the century apartment building, across the street ...

The Lucky Goatherds

Next time you read about an auctioneer’s gavel coming down on a 150-million-dollar painting bought by some flunky representing the gangster ruling family of Qatar, don’t ooh ...


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