Gstaad I wrote this last week, as we’re going to press early. It seems everyone who is anyone is staying up late on Sunday night in order to watch the Oscars, and cheer for the gay western which has been nominated for eight Academy Awards. I have not seen Brokebutt Mountain, but I hear that
Ancona I am here on a pilgrimage, honouring the descendants of this greatest of Italian towns, men like Galileo, Michelangelo, Dante and, of course, Matthew d’Ancona, considered among those in the know the greatest Anconan of them all. Just kidding. I’m in Gstaad, and just did three runs before breakfast, because the plebs have arrived
Gstaad I am personally in touch with British Muslim leaders and appealing to them to spare the life of my friend Claus von B
To Harrow, the most heroic of public schools, for a speech about the press, probably among the least defensible of professions. I say the most heroic because Harrow lost 644 boys in the Great War, more than any other public school, I believe. One enters the building where I spoke about the unspeakable through a
Rome They say that the invading Barbarians were so overwhelmed by the Pantheon’s beauty that they didn’t take it apart brick by brick. It is, of course, the most perfectly symmetrical monument, along with the Parthenon, to have survived since antiquity, the former lucky enough not to have been blown up à la latter. The
Gstaad On the evening that Charles Kennedy resigned, Barry and Lizzie Humphries came to dinner. My German cook Alexander made a special cake for Dame Edna, but Barry smelled a rat. He asked if the cake contained any alcohol. The answer was almost none at all. ‘Well,’ said the great man, who has not had
Liberal columnists, especially in London, New York and Los Angeles, can’t quite grasp why some Christians get upset about people saying ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Happy Christmas’. ‘People who use the word holiday now face angry Christian protests,’ they assert. Well, if they have faced such protests, it’s news to me. Most Christians I know
New York My last week in the Bagel and then back to good old London. And it’s just as well I’m still here, or some of Sunny Marlborough’s children might take a swipe at me. Last week I wrote about the old duke, correctly calling him Sunny, a diminutive which derives from Sunderland, one of
New York A letter to the mother of my children from the greatest living French writer, Michel Déon, one of the 40 immortals of the French Academy, shows me to be a philistine. Michel kindly points out that Mozart’s Don Juan was inspired by a Molière play, not by a Beaumarchais one, as I wrote
New York I thought Catherine Meyer made the week’s most intelligent remark: ‘If Cabinet ministers can sell their memoirs, why can’t civil servants?’ Or words to that effect. She’s a good German, probably the old-fashioned kind, but the old-fashioned kind has been unpopular since the war, although never with me. Now she’s more unpopular than
New York When Jean-Marie Le Pen democratically won the right to challenge the incumbent Jacques Chirac for the presidency in 2002, I wrote in this here space that happiness was to wake up and find Le Pen president of France. By the reaction I had, you’d think I had prayed for Mao, Stalin, Hitler and
Unlike Peregrine Worsthorne, I thought the Duff Cooper diaries were interesting and terrific, and also made me envious as hell. Oh, to have lived back then. People sure had fun. I particularly liked the part where Duff puts down a certain party as boring because of the presence of spivs. Well, lucky old Duff. If
Washington DC As far as catfights are concerned, this one cannot compare with, say, Bette Davis v. Joan Crawford, or even Crystal v. Alexis Carrington, but it will do for the rainy season. Maureen Dowd, a 55-year-old New York Times columnist known for her hysterical outbursts against George W. Bush, has taken an 800-word swipe
Rome Another bride, another groom, another sunny honeymoon, another season, another reason, for making whoopee… Like the song by Sammy Kahn, we made whoopee in Rome last weekend, the excuse being — yes, you guessed it — a wedding. Il Principe Boncompagni Ludovisi and his former wife Benedetta, born Barberini Colonna, married off their boy
Venice I may have spoken too soon. Venice is also a good place for a party. The only trouble with Venezia is that anything one writes about the place has already been written. Even what I’ve just said has been said a thousand times. Original pronouncements about the Dresden of the south are rare; as
Madrid This is the sultriest city in Europe and, along with Paris and Rome, the most romantic capital of the old continent. When visiting Madrid there is only one place to stay, the Hotel Ritz, right in the heart of the city, opposite the Prado. There is a bucolic air about the Ritz, with the
Gstaad I can’t remember exactly how long ago it was, sometime during the late Nineties, but I do remember that at the time I was sort of running a section of the New York Press called ‘Taki’s Top Drawer’. I say sort of because I’m not exactly a hands-on editor. In fact, I’m no hands
Gstaad Back in the good old days, the common belief was that the climate was determined by a large number of gods, with Poseidon in specific charge of the weather at sea. Poseidon could be a hell of a shit at times, torturing poor sailors for years, starting with the wily Ithakan king, Odysseus. Still,
Gstaad I know few politicians and speak to even fewer — Lady Thatcher and Lord Tebbitt being the exceptions — so I’m hardly the one to judge whether being a cuckold is good for one’s political career or not. I am, of course, talking about Nicolas Sarkozy’s marital problems, and the fears expressed by the
Gstaad Sartre famously called hell other people, and he had not even been on a boat anchored next to a gin palace during the month of August. Yachting in the Med used to be a cliché, as well as a very enjoyable pursuit. No longer. In Simi, one of the least known and prettiest of