Here’s the definitive scoop on poor old Hellas, better known nowadays as the EU country that missed its day at the municipal dump. Greece will default sometime in 2012 and, if there are any doubters around, tell them this comes from the great economist Taki, the very same Taki who smelled a rat even before
Taki lives the High life New York Summertime and, as the song tells us, ‘the livin’ is easy’. The temperature is in the nineties, girls’ dresses are at their flimsiest, love is in the air, and sex is everywhere, so what else can one wish for? This is my last week in the Bagel, and
New York In that wonderful old Broadway musical Guys and Dolls, gambler Sky Masterson is romancing Sister Sarah Brown of the Salvation Army after an all-nighter of boozing it up in Havana. Walking her home to her mission in New York, he tells her that the only place in the world where ‘the dawn is
Orlando A neutron bomb hit this place just as I got off the aeroplane, killing all humans but leaving the buildings standing. It was a horrid, unpardonable crime, and for it I blame the scientists. But not for the reasons you think. They should have done it the other way round. Kill the buildings, save
Why would a German playboy-billionaire industrialist with a large family and lots of old and good friends have dinner in Gstaad with one of his closest buddies, then go up to his chalet and put a bullet in his brain? As of writing, Gunter Sachs’s suicide is a mystery. But Gunter was always somewhat mysterious,
Mme Nhu, who died two days before THE wedding, was a hell of a woman. Her maternal grandmother was a Vietnamese princess of impeccable credentials, yet when she was captured by the commies in Hue in 1946, she stood up to them until the French rescued her four months later. She was anti-French and anti-commie,
New York How fair a rule is monarchy? A Byzantine scholar wrote that it was the fairest, to the point that God sustained it, as long as the emperors were elected by the army or an aristocratic senate. With their coronation, legitimate successors and usurpers alike automatically became sacred. The ancient Greeks went a step
New York On Tuesday last, 12 April, 150 years ago, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces fired the first shots on Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbour, South Carolina. The bombardment lasted 36 hours, with Fort Sumter occasionally replying with fire of its own. Then the white flag went up and the Union troops
New York I went to see a revival of Arcadia in the beautiful Ethel Barrymore Theatre last Saturday night, and it made my day. Tom Stoppard is our greatest playwright, and I think Arcadia is his best play, although a couple of other gems of his come close. I was with Marine Major Michael Warring
New York They say that when sexual attraction sets in all other brain functions shut down. It’s nature’s way of ensuring procreation. My brain shut down last week — and for a Hollywood actress, to boot. Of German extraction, Sandra Bullock is not the classic Aryan goddess, but most attractive in the flesh, more so
Twenty-two years or so ago, I wrote a column for the New York Observer, a weekly paper owned by a tycoon named Arthur Carter, a man who had come up the hard way and had made his fortune on Wall Street, but one who had retained his loathing for those who had made it the
I’ve got end-of-season blues. I know I say this every year, but this has been a particularly fun winter, with friends throwing goodbye parties, dinners and lunches since the beginning of March. My liver has done a Gaddafi and taken a brutal revenge on my body, and the right ankle is doing a Saif as
Up to London to collect my PhD from the London School of Economics. It is Dr Taki from now on, and Jeremy Clarke can eat his heart out. If he’d stay out of pubs and do some research instead, he, too, might one day get a PhD. Like Dr Gaddafi and Dr Taki. Actually, my
Sitting in my study, whose windows are covered in icicles, one feels cocooned from the elements, as if in a prison cell with the doors unlocked. The snows have finally come, the horizons are totally white, clouds and snowy peaks intermingling in a rhapsody of white, green and blue, the last two provided by pine
I haven’t got that much time left, but I’d gladly give ten years of my life to see that homicidal maniac Gaddafi strung up from a palm tree alongside his warthog sons, especially Hannibal Gaddafi, an expert in imprisoning and torturing helpless servants and beating up women in posh Western hotels. What a ghastly world
I write this on Valentine’s Day, having run into the King of Greece early this morning in the local bank asking a teller where he could buy a Valentine card for his queen. (He received a blank stare for his trouble.) After 47 years of marriage, it’s nice to know that even kings bring Valentine
Philosophy has been known to be a bit of a struggle for many of us, except, of course, if we happen to be professional footballers, pop stars, film actors, reality TV performers or hedge-fund managers. Although in last week’s Spectator Quentin Letts offered a primer on how to pretend to be an Egypt expert, the
In 1940, Leo Amery, speaking in the House of Commons, rebuked Neville Chamberlain and his colleagues with the Oliver Cromwell quote, ‘In the name of God, go!’ This was after the fall of France with England on the brink. Those asking for Mubarak to go are on the street, not in parliament, which doesn’t exist
About 15 or so years ago I received a very polite letter from Belgium asking me to list three of the most pompous and self-important people in the UK. It came with a self-addressed return envelope and stamp. The writer was known to me as ‘l’entarteur’, a man who would approach the pompous and vainglorious
Gstaad Having spent a great part of my life charting the decline of civilisation, I am not at all surprised at the goings-on in Tunisia, especially as I never considered the place to be civilised. How apt that the arch crook dictator Ben Ali (Baba) slithered away to Saudi Arabia, itself a beacon of democracy