The “fin de saison” feeling is like the end of term in boarding school. Bittersweet. At school one was cocooned from the big bad outside world, here in Gstaad, far from the ...

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote “that there are no second acts in American lives.” In his particular case poor Scott was right. He died broke and forgotten in his early ...

Gstaad. A lovely liquid lunch in a mountain hut with my friend Nicola Anouilh after two hard runs. Blue skies, gentle winds, a few puffs of white cloud, and the sound of bells ...

Gstaad. When I spoke with the mayor of Gstaad, as well as some other local stalwarts, they all assured me that they are ready for any invasion by the Libyans, and are confident ...

Greece is a country that thrives on rumor. Hearsay has been a part of the Greek DNA since time immemorial. Even Plato remarked on it. Demagogues used rumor and gossip to silence ...

St. Moritz. As they used to say in Flatbush, I shoulda stood in bed.  So leaving the pretty village of Gstaad on a sunny Tuesday morning, I set out for St. Moritz to attend ...

Bravo Goldman Sachs. You’ve done it again. As in the U.S. subprime crisis,  this house of ill repute created a deal which helped the Greeks obscure billions in debt from ...

Thirty-nine years ago this spring I was in Vietnam, busy sending non-stop dispatches back home about how well the war was going for the good guys. When a year later the North ...

I often wonder as to why people are shocked, shocked—Captain Renault-like—to discover that modern football is a malodorous cesspit teeming with leeches and crooks, or ...

“It was a dark and stormy night, but we were young and thought we could do anything. There was no looking back. None of that David Copperfield kind of nonsense. We were already ...

Reading good books is like making love. Reading bad ones is like masturbating. I’ve just read three good ones, one of which got on my nerves because it was about a ...

Gstaad. I went to a wonderful party, three days of a non-stop feast, although not at the Palace, the mere hoi polloi were excluded, in theory at least. There wasn’t a sign of ...

I suppose it’s a kind of solace during these snowy times that Norway, the country with the world’s highest per capita income, has not missed a single working day through ...

Arnold Toynbee read Spengler’s The Decline of the West as a young historian at the University of London and had the same reaction I did when I first read Hemingway. It blew his ...

Let’s start 2010 right and mention a few honest people in the news… I wrote this sentence a couple of hours ago, not realizing how difficult it was going to be to find even ...

Historically, at least in America, people who seek to thrive in the theatre, publishing, finance, media, or even the gossip columns, make their way to Manhattan. Once here, the ...