On board S/Y Bushido In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain and the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving
On board S/Y Bushido With plenty of time on my hands to read — television and DVDs are forbidden on board although both are available — I am shocked at the severity, downright viciousness, in fact, of the reviews about my two old friends, Jimmy Goldsmith and John Aspinall, in John Pearson’s book The Gamblers.
On board S/Y Bushido The island evenings are always subtle and slow. White-painted houses rise up steeply from the wine-dark sea, the sunset drifting over the hills above the port, the streetlamps faintly lighting the quays along the waterfront. In Symi, one of the most picturesque of the islands bordering Turkey, the hawkers emerge as
Far be it from me to denounce the British for having lost interest in their heritage — they have embraced multiculturalism, deny the good their empire once brought the world, have banned fox hunting — but when it comes to changes that directly affect me, it’s time for action. Especially when the change is based
A note from Jeremy Sykes enclosing an article about a friend of mine who died 40 years ago last Tuesday, on 5 July 1965. In his kind letter, Jeremy Sykes assumes that I knew the man who died in his Ferrari returning from a Parisian nightclub so long ago, and he is absolutely spot on.
Ah! Agh! Aaah! Ah! Aaaaa! Ugh! Ugha! Aha! Aaaah! Aaaha! Aaa! No, it’s not an orgy I’m listening to, just Wimbledon 2005. What has happened to the once-gentle game? You’d think phone- sex operators had taken over. Incidentally, the guttural noise has nothing to do with power-hitting, just gamesmanship. Serena Williams sometimes goes quiet and
To the Royal Hellenic Yacht Club, high above the tiny gem of a marina once upon a time known as Turkolimano, its name changed to Mikrolimano after the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus. The yacht club also dropped the Royal, which is par for the course. Actually, it is the standard method used by Greek
London ‘Where did it all go?’ asks Mark Steyn in the National Review, talking about airline service, or the lack of it, rather. Well, I read the piece before getting on a BA flight from the Bagel to London in order to prepare myself for the worst, and I had a very nice surprise as
New York My last week in the Bagel, and just as well. Things are heating up. Mind you, the last two weekends have been great. Noo Yawkers are very predictable, almost lemming-like. Come late May and June, everyone heads out of town, packing themselves into overloaded cars to travel on gridlocked highways to the Hamptons
New York Robert Wood Johnson IV is the billionaire owner of the New York Jets, an American football team which plays in New Jersey, as its crosstown rivals, the New York Giants, also do. Big Bagel real estate is much too expensive to waste on football stadiums, or so the saying goes. Mayor Mike Bloomberg
New York To Roxbury, Connecticut, a tiny, beautiful village covered in leafy verdure and straight out of a black-and-white film from the Forties depicting white, Christian, innocent America. But, wait a minute: white, Christian, waspy, thrifty Americans did not drive turbo Bentleys worth a quarter of a million quid, did not employ discreet minders to
New York A letter from an English couple, who are long-time friends of mine, arrived, thanking me for lending them my London flat. (They live in America.) ‘We also managed to fit in a wedding near Oxford and a long private chat with the Queen at Windsor…who, in contrast to the incumbent at the White
New York I Married a Princess is among the most embarrassing reality shows to have appeared on American television, which makes it unique in view of the garbage which fill the airways 24 unrelenting hours per day. The format is a simple one: a man and his wife and their small children spend their days
Trust Tony Blair to call an election the day after The Spectator goes to press: 5 May is a lousy day for conservatives the world over. Karl Marx was born 5 May 1818 in Trier, the Rhineland. The only good thing about the date took place in 1816, when ‘O Solitude’, John Keats’s first published
New York Happiness is a German pope succeeding the greatest pope ever, a Pole. Not everyone agrees with me. Blogger Andrew Sullivan, a Brit expatriate and gay-rights advocate, called it a ‘full-scale assault’ on liberal Catholics. If he is a typical liberal Catholic, he has just doubled my joy at Benedict XVI’s election. Fifty years
New York The founder of the Dorothy Parker society, Kevin Fitzpatrick, recently wrote to the F. Scott Fitzgerald society inviting its members to an Algonquin hotel cocktail party, a gracious gesture worthy of old Scott himself. The Fitzgerald types did not even bother to answer. Back in his day, that would have constituted a casus
New York It’s all over but the shouting, as they say in the Bagel, but bitchy British tabloids had nothing on the locals where Chuck and his bride were concerned. Call it envy, call it republicanism, but, wink-wink, the Yankee press had a field day. Tina Brown, an expatriate Brit who passes as an English
New York Thirty-five years or so ago, William Buckley received an unexpected telephone call from one John Lennon. Intrigued, Bill listened while the John Lennon himself — with his Japanese wife blabbering away in the background — pleaded with him for help in remaining in the Land of the Free. Lennon had had a drug
Nemmersdorf is a village in East Prussia that was overrun by the Soviets in the autumn of 1944. After seizing the village, the Russkies raped all the women, regardless of age, and then crucified them. All of them. Men and children were clubbed to death or run over with tanks. Not a single person survived.
Gstaad Skiing without poles accentuates the new carving technique, which uses one’s edges and the upper body to turn. During the 1950s we checked before a bump, planted the pole, unweighted the skis and turned. Then came the Austrian technique of weddle, which involves a shifting of the hips while keeping the body straight on