Gstaad An article in Vanity Fair about a man I knew for over 40 years has turned me into Orlando Furioso. Oleg Cassini died in 2006 when he was well into his nineties. We met in 1956 on an aeroplane going to Bermuda to play a tennis tournament. Cassini was a good club player and
On board S/Y Bushido Sailing down the eastern coast of the Peloponnese I thought I spotted some anti-Semites adrift, but they turned out to be Norwegians, flying a British flag. Although becalmed they needed nothing but a breeze, so we wished them good day and motored off. Ever since Shimon Peres accused the UK of
On board S/Y Bushido If a boat can be called a work of art then surely ones designed by William Fife qualify him as the Degas of yacht construction. Fife was a Scot, but unlike fellow Scots such as Blair and Brown, he handed down beauty, not misery, modern maritime Parthenons rather than debt and
On board s/y Bushido ‘Trimming the Jib’ is a short essay by Ernest Hemingway and it has to do with the sea. And love. And passion. He wrote it shortly before The Old Man and the Sea, which helped land him the Nobel Prize in Literature. Here it is in its entirety: He ran aground
Athens As everyone knows, Sigmund Freud was a fraud. And, like many frauds, he thought the Parthenon might also be one. But he summoned his nerve and visited the sacred site and was delighted as well as shocked at what he saw. This was 1904. Like other visitors, Freud dreaded that the real thing might
My last week in London felt like the end of a school term — bittersweet. I was glad to be flying off to the sun, but sad to leave good friends and very good times behind. Mind you, the last night, that of the Speccie summer party, descended into farce when my Low life colleague
Mykonos Lying northward of the sacred island of Delos, Mykonos is as profane as it gets. Largely barren, it used to be a brothel during ancient times, or so Herodotus tells us, and it continues its erotic, carnal ways as the mecca of gay and lesbian love. Sir Elton and Lady John were just here,
My last week in London and it is just as well. One more would most likely kill me. The least frantic event was the one that Simon Phillips and Roger Moore threw in Harry’s Bar for Unicef, as worthy a charity as there is, following the Masterpiece Fair at the former Chelsea Barracks. I sat
During my book party one month ago — rather surprisingly, the thing is selling well — I spotted Ferdinand Mount in the crowd and asked him to meet a friend of mine. Ferdy recognised the name immediately. ‘You brought cheer to the plains of India,’ he told Naresh Kumar, quoting a headline of more than
Is there anything worse than listening to those hucksters in South Africa going bananas over the ugly game called football? Modern society is dominated by emotion and propaganda, not to mention profit, and when all three are combined what we get is the World Cup. Technicolor pictures of fat men and women jumping up and
The Greco–Roman egghead view was that events do not occur at random according to the whims of the Gods, but according to a repetitive cycle. Just as life followed birth and death followed decline, monarchy decayed into tyranny, leading to aristocracy, which decayed into oligarchy, which led in turn to selective democracy, followed by anarchy
It’s a topsy-turvy world when the deputy editor of The Spectator, a lady, is in Afghanistan, while the High life correspondent of the same magazine cowers in a Belgravia basement wearing full body armour and his Wehrmacht helmet. Obviously, it should be the other way round, but now it’s a woman’s world and we men
On board S/Y Bushido, off St Tropez My book party’s best line was Claus von Bülow’s, as told to Antony Beevor, Piers Paul Read, Paul Johnson and Sir V.S. Naipaul, among the literary worthies who took the time to attend the poor little Greek boy’s launch at Brooks’s. ‘The last book party I attended,’ said
The block I’ve lived on these past 35 years is next to what no less a Manhattan authority than Woody Allen has called the most beautiful street in the city. At this time of year, the elms and poplar trees give my block a country feeling, which for me is as good as it gets.
As I write, the political situation in Britain has many of her citizens bewildered. Despite the staggering deficits and economic shocks, the good people of Britain voted with their hearts, rather than their heads. Not being a medium, I will not try to predict what will happen. My advice to loyal Spectator readers is to
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina Let me take you away from politics for a bit, and bring you down here to Myrtle Beach, a downmarket Miami Beach but with much nicer and friendlier locals. There is even a Hemingway Street — Papa came fishing around here — which would never happen in Miami. Only porn stars
New York It’s up early every day, before 8 a.m., and a brisk walk through the park before breakfast on the way to judo practice. A pale green washes the fields, daffodils pushing through the crusty earth. The joggers are out in force, young Jewish princesses struggling while getting in shape for serious Bloomingdale’s shopping
New York April in the Bagel is as good as it gets. The girls are back in their summer dresses, people are crowding the outdoor cafés, and Central Park is an explosion of greens and pinks. Spring, as the song says, is busting out all over. And the taxman cometh — though not for 41
New York If one was making £160,000 per week — that’s more than a quarter of a million dollars every seven days — it would be safe to assume that one’s father would not choose to deal in cocaine for a living. Not necessarily, it seems — at least not in the John Terry family.
New York In the 45 years I spent going to Annabel’s I never once heard anyone say, ‘Let’s go to Birley’s.’ It was Annabel’s or Harry’s, or Mark’s, but never Birley’s. Now I read that Richard Caring, the man who bought Mark Birley’s joints, is trying to stop Robin Birley, Mark’s only son, from using
