Sartre was a far greater fornicator than philosopher, but he did come up with the greatest truism of them all: ‘Hell is other people.’ (The last line in one of his plays.) Mind you, a Greek savant has bettered him by proclaiming Hell is other people speaking on their mobiles inside an aeroplane. Yes, it
Gstaad There’s fear and loathing around here, and it has nothing to do with lousy snow conditions. Fear that UBS, the biggest Swiss bank, is in trouble, loathing for those whose greed brought this about. ‘Reckless’ is now a synonym for ‘banker’ as the financial system teeters on the brink. UBS has denied it is
It would take the greatest bloodhound reporter of all time to discover a person with a good word to say about Eliot Spitzer, the first man ever to bully Congress for an invite on bond insurance so he could meet with cutie-pie Ashley Alexandra Dupré in Room 871 the night before. When the crumbum finally
Around 15 years or so ago I was fast asleep late in the morning when I got an ear-splitting telephone call from Greece. It was Vicki Woods, a Telegraph writer, and she sounded anxious. If memory serves, and it does because she subsequently wrote a piece about it which made it into The Week, the
Who the hell does David Cameron think he is to tell Benji Mancroft to think more before opening his mouth? Did Cameron think when he asked us to hug a hoodlum? I’ve been lucky and never had to go to a hospital in the UK but, unless I was bleeding to death and needed emergency
Taki lives the High Life An interesting week, to say the least. A Carlton Club speech on multiculturalism which didn’t quite come off, a kidnapping in Gstaad, a party in London to celebrate David Tang’s knighthood, the mugging of John McCain by the man who committed adultery with Emma Gilbey, a great Pug’s club lunch
Why do children lie? asks a boring headline in an even more boring Big Bagel magazine article. According to the bores who wrote it, children are encouraged to tell white lies, hence they get comfortable with being disingenuous, and insincerity becomes a daily occurrence. ‘Many books advise parents to just let lies go — they’ll
Gstaad ‘Let me put it in, just a little bit’ was known as the second biggest lie after ‘the cheque is in the mail’ and it comes to mind when the Archbishop of Canterbury asks for just a little bit of sharia law. Enough said. People far more qualified than me have already commented on
Gstaad In the good old days of the Cold War, Athenian hacks used to say that there were only two countries where secrets were safe: China and Greece. In the former nobody talked. In the latter everyone did, hence no one believed a word. I thought of the saying during a chic Gstaad dinner party
Gstaad The fat cats were all over Davos last week, greedy bankers, self-important bosses of publicly owned multinationals, craven hedge funders and shameless publicity-seekers such as Bono and others of his ilk mixing freely with Gordon Brown, Al Gore and Bill Gates. No, Carla Bruni did not attend, nor did Amy Winehouse, who had better
Gstaad I’ve been watching the Australian Tennis Open on the telly and boring myself to sleep. The modern game is too one-dimensional, the players too predictable. The pumping of the fist after a winner is now de rigueur, as is the tapping of the ball five, ten, in the case of Nadal 16 times before
Gstaad The row over Indonesian ‘hobbits’ has split this beautiful alpine village in half. Alas, it began when I wrote something about the Olden, one of Gstaad’s oldest and most beautiful inns and its owner Bernie Ecclestone, of Formula I fame. The Olden had orginally been owned by the Mullener family, since the turn of
Although I have to declare an interest, by far the most authentic comments about the Bhutto murder were those made by Jemima Khan in the Sunday Telegraph. As Jemima pointed out, Benazir never repealed the Hudood Ordinances, Pakistan’s ‘heinous’ laws that make no distinction between rape and adultery, failed to pass a single major law
New Year’s Eve parties cannot be described in lyrical terms, recalling perhaps the elegance of poetry by, say, Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde’s decadence being more like it. I am not among those who hate New Year’s parties; in fact, on the contrary. Let’s start with the bad news. The worst New Year’s ever was 31 December
It is that time of year again. The time for peace and goodwill to all men. Mind you, goodwill towards all men is getting harder by the minute, what with those psychopathic murderers in the Sudan and in Zimbabwe. When I look back and remember the rubbish that was written by phoneys like Christopher Hitchens
How we determine the membership of the world’s most exclusive club New York OK. Next to last column before the end of the year one, and of course it has to be about the crisis that has enveloped Pug’s, the world’s most exclusive of clubs. For any of you who may have missed it, here,
New York I’m not sure which of the two sights was funnier: hundreds of Brit bargain-hunters huffing and puffing and laden with enormous shopping bags while taking advantage of the shot-to-hell dollar, or the English football heroes huffing and puffing and being sliced up by the national team of a tiny country which didn’t exist
New York Talk about synchronism. The invitation to the launch of John Richardson’s A Life of Picasso arrived the same day as Peter Arnold’s letter concerning the artist. Volume III, 1917–1932, was reviewed by William Boyd on 3 November, in these here books pages. The novelist loved it and eagerly awaits more. I like John
New York Three months before the Americans committed their greatest foreign policy blunder ever, I had gone up to Cape Cod to interview Norman Mailer. Towards the end of his life, Norman called himself a left-conservative, and went as far as to agree that losing one’s culture through immigration was not a good thing. But
New York My good friend George Szamuely, who is very big in the Jewish community of the Bagel, swears this is a true story. (George’s father, incidentally, was Tibor Szamuely, a great man who managed to leave the Gulag with 5,000 books and was writing leaders for The Spectator when he died suddenly at the
