Chelsea Bridge, London

London, 1952

There’s a narrow stretch of Chelsea south of the King’s Road from Oakley Street to Ormond Gate that reminds me of postwar London when I first came here with my dad. Names like ...

Charles River, Boston

‘Heart of Champions,’ Night of Fun

I find most films nowadays as fascinating as a lengthy history of orthodontics, but then I’m spoiled rotten having watched old black-and-white pearls such as From Here to ...

City of London

The Great Divide

NEW YORK—“The City of London Is Hiding the World’s Stolen Money,” screams a Bagel Times headline, as bogus a message as that caricature of a newspaper’s other captions ...

Succession

‘Succession’ Story

It has stepped into the pop culture spotlight via the HBO hit Succession, a hit job on the very rich and powerful produced by the very rich and much more powerful Adam McKay (The ...

Vero Beach, FL

Join the Club

Around twenty years or so ago I had point for match point on a perfect grass court in Fort Belvedere. We’d been playing for close to two hours. I remember hitting a topspin ...

Warsaw, Poland

One Night in Poland

Do any of you remember the time when everything took place on terraces and outdoor cafés? Before everyone retreated into laptops and mobile telephones and Twitter? When ...

Westminster, London

The Toothless Shark

Nice to be back in London, and Glebe Place is a delight. Mind you, it’s not the mansion I was expecting, just a very nice mews house on a very quiet part of the street away from ...

Pentonville Prison 1842

The Past Is Precious

Memories for me are like beautifully edited copy, all cleaned up and including only the good parts. The wife tells me that I’m quite lucky in choosing to remember just pleasant ...

Dinner-Party Discourse

GSTAAD—Mercedes-Benz heir Mick Flick and I have been friends for over half a century. We both married Schoenburgs, both like the odd drink, both adore the fair sex, and are now ...

Anne Baxter and Bette Davis

You Gotta Believe

GSTAAD—Good manners aside, what I miss nowadays is a new, intelligent, fine-acted movie. Never have I seen so much garbage as there is on TV today: sci-fi crap, superhero ...

The Thing About Helvetia…

GSTAAD—When Gerald Murphy and Cole Porter discovered the French Riviera as a summer resort during the early ’20s, the swells and avant-gardes still spent the warm months in ...

King Constantine II and Queen Anne-Marie

Battle Royal

GSTAAD—It seems to be open season on royals, starting with Prince Andrew and the charges against him by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a graduate of the Jeffrey Epstein finishing ...

Games Over

CORONIS—Embracing one’s vulnerability seems to have replaced the higher, faster, stronger emblem of the Olympics. The very frailty that makes us human seems to have won over ...

On Sail

PATMOS—A very long time ago I wrote right here that spending a summer on the Riviera or the Greek isles without a boat was as useless as a eunuch in a cathouse. That was then ...

Paradise in Patmos

GREECE—Two hundred years ago last March, the Greeks rose up against the hated Turks, who had occupied most of the mainland for 400 years, and with the help of Britain, France, ...

Chora, Patmos

A Different Kind of Island

GREECE—I’m in Patmos with four grandchildren, two children, and a wife. I know, I know, it sounds very lower-middle-class and is, only Bournemouth and some sun beds are ...


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