New York The war on terror, as the most inarticulate man ever to inhabit the White House calls it, has now lasted longer than the second world war. And take it from Taki, it’s not going away, not in my lifetime, that’s for sure. Insurgencies have a tendency to wear out their enemy and eventually
There was this evil Albanian gang specialising in kidnapping young girls, forcibly addicting them to heroin and selling them on to wealthy Arabs as sex slaves. To simplify their operation and reduce shipping costs, the gang had decided to concentrate their efforts on kidnapping middle-class Californian girls arriving at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.
I have been living in hotels for so long I am beginning to hallucinate. For example, at an EU summit on Saturday I could have sworn that Nicolas Sarkozy winked at me. I was fighting my way to the front of a media scrum at the Elysée Palace and almost fell over the rope. I
I cannot help feeling a certain affinity with Peter Mandelson. Like me, he has been given a number of high-profile jobs, only to lose them in slightly dubious circumstances. Yet somehow he always manages to bounce back. He is the political equivalent of a Weeble: no matter how near he comes to toppling over, he
Reasons to be cheerful The evenings are getting darker, someone called Libor has nicked all our money, and Scarlett Johansson’s got married. There’s little to smile about. So in a spirit of pro bono here are some reasons to be cheerful. For starters, rugby is becoming absolutely fantastic. Not quite the new football, but I
Q. Next week I will visit London where I have been invited to an exhibition in Cork Street by the artist Richard Foster. Since I understand he is one of the so-called Pinstripe Painters, I wonder if you can advise me whether it will be de rigueur to wear a pinstripe suit myself? I worry
Dot Wordsworth on sex and séances In 1885 W.T. Stead bought a 13-year-old girl for £5 as part of his campaign to get the age of consent raised to 16. He was the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, an evening paper. Stead’s allies included Bramwell Booth, the son of the founder of the Salvation
