It is very still as I sit down to write, the atmosphere heavy and oppressive. They say time flies, but less so if one looks backward. Nearly a thousand years before Constantinople ...

ONBOARD S/Y BUSHIDO—I made a resolution long ago never to mention the Olympics, but resolutions are made to be broken. My uncle competed in Los Angeles in 1932 and Berlin in ...

ONBOARD S/Y BUSHIDO—However you cut it, Greek demagogues are bluffing that the faceless suits of Brussels will give in to the blackmail and fold their hand. Greeks are born ...

ONBOARD S/Y BUSHIDO—My moment of glory came and went in a jiffy. It was actually a whole afternoon of filming onboard without a single retake, temper tantrum, or even the ...

MIAMI BEACH—I thought it a good time to visit, no Spring Break debauchery nor fashionista pretense. So I signed up yet again for the judo championships, trained very hard, and ...

So Sarko and Bruni are out, Hollande is in, and I’m off to the Actor’s Studio to brush up on my acting lessons. (Stanley Kowalski is reborn. Stel-LAAA!) My friend Edward Jay ...

NEW YORK—I have settled into my Big Bagel routine as if I never went away: up early, a 25-minute walk through the park, one hour of judo working with three opponents, walk back, ...

The first friend I made at Lawrenceville School was Reuben Batista, eldest son of the Cuban strongman. Being foreigners gave us something in common, the rest of the school being ...

NEW YORK—Seeing Manhattan rising from the distance is always a treat. I am not sure it’s possible for anyone brought up around these parts to appreciate entirely what New ...

Papa Hemingway’s recently published letter to an Italian male friend purportedly revealed the “human side” of which his admirers were already well aware. (Like Bogie, he was ...

Dr. David Starkey is a great man, a Tudor historian, and one of the few academics who tells it like it is. Openly gay, he has no time for prancing queens and other such clown ...

In the February 18 issue of the world’s greatest weekly I wrote that I had fallen madly in love with Jessica Raine, the actress who portrays nurse Jenny in the Sunday-night BBC ...

GSTAAD—It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas: nonstop snowfall, an empty main street, and the closing of the Palace hotel as well as the Eagle club. (I give the ...

Who was the first to declare that nothing counts a lot and very little counts at all? The cynic and sesquipedalian Alastair Forbes claimed it, but he spoke with a forked tongue. ...

Briefly home from boarding school back in 1951, I went to a bar with a phony draft card, ordered a beer, and watched Rocky Marciano knock out my idol Joe Louis. Joe was 37 and ...

GSTAAD—It’s early in the silvery morning light as I look out my window up here in the heights. A batallion of wispy white clouds hides behind the surrounding mountains—a ...