Turner Classic Movies (TCM), the Ted Turner golden oldies network, saluted Louis Jourdan last week with a night of his movies, an evening that sure brought back memories. The highlight of the evening was the 1948 Letter from an Unknown Woman, based on a story by the tragic Stefan Zweig, a great writer who despaired
Gstaad 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 crowds and bustle, one has time to ponder the melting snows and dream about one’s youth. Closing day at the Eagle Club
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 forties, but at least he expired in the arms of his lover, the beautiful Miss Graham, who went on to become a powerful gossip columnist
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 from the nearby cowshed. If there’s a better way of communing with nature, I haven’t come across it yet. The natural beauty
Gstaad When I spoke to 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 that they will kick them back into the Mediterranean where they came from. For any of you who might have missed it
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 the Annual General Meeting of Pugs club and to participate in the first Pugs uphill ski race on the new course
I often wonder why people are shocked, shocked — Captain Renault-like — to discover that modern football is a malodorous cesspit teeming with leeches and crooks, or that Tony Blair is a congenital liar not worthy of any position except that of orderly in a prison gym. The latest shock is the discovery that Jacob
‘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 men. We had our finger on what was going on between self and culture. We did away with the traditional architecture of
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 homosexualist, as opposed to a homosexual. Which in fact was what the other two were about. Now if someone had suggested to me long
Gstaad I went to a wonderful party, three days of a non-stop feast. Although not at the Palace, mere hoi polloi were excluded, in theory at least. There was no sign of a Kate or a Mick — they must have forgotten the date. Actually, they were not invited, but Topper (who no one could
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 inclement weather, and as I write there are 30 feet of snow covering the country. In some areas much more than 30 feet of the
Arnold Toynbee read Spengler’s The Decline of the West as a young historian at the University of London and had the same reaction as I did when I first read Hemingway. It blew his mind. He found it both exhilarating and dismaying. Exhilarating because of its historical insights, dismaying for it disposed of the questions
Let’s start 2010 right and mention a few honest people in the news. I wrote this sentence a couple of hours ago, not realising how difficult it was going to be to find even one honest boldfaced name. Like old Diogenes, I am still looking as my deadline nears. Which reminds me: at least the
Historically, at least in America, people who seek to thrive in the theatre, publishing, on Wall Street, in the media, or even on the gossip columns make their way to Manhattan. Once here, the climb begins, and it’s tougher than any mountain in Nepal. As E.B. White, the great Big Bagel chronicler, wrote, ‘All it
The hysteria over Tiger Woods is simply wonderful. Compared with Bill Clinton’s tarts, Tiger’s are of slightly better quality, which is not saying much. The prettiest of the lot, Rachel Uchitel, is something else. This is hard for me to admit, but she was at school with my daughter and I had actually noticed her
When the Marx Brothers announced in 1946 that their upcoming film was called A Night in Casablanca, Warner Bros threatened to sue for breach of copyright. Warner had produced the great hit Casablanca four years earlier, and insisted that the funny men were trying to cash in on it. But Groucho was no slouch. He
The fourth and last time I debated at the Oxford Union was three or four years ago, and it was a total disaster. The motion was that Katrina’s aftermath was Bush’s fault, and I was against it. A quarter of a century before that, Auberon Waugh and I had wiped out the opposition under the
It’s good to be in Texas. To a European like me, Texas is why we came to America. It’s a huge state, but more importantly it’s a state of mind. It is a fount of freedom and imagination. For most of the inhabitants of America’s two coasts, Texas is worse than flyover country. Texas represents
New York At an outdoor luncheon party in Sussex celebrating Willy Shawcross’s birthday some years ago, I asked his then 95-year-old father whom he found the most interesting man at Nuremberg. ‘Goering,’ was the monosyllabic reply. ‘I mean from both sides,’ I said. ‘Goering,’ said Lord Shawcross. He later told me how the Nazi would
New York ‘Why would he run for Parliament?’ screams the headline in the New York Times. A subheading lists ‘An inherited passion for women, gambling, the environment and politics’. As I start to read, I fear the worst, but as it turns out it could have been a lot worse. Zac Goldsmith’s name is big