New york

Thursday

Vicky Ward

The rich are a different species

The scene: a funeral parlour in New York. Doors clang as a family relative, the ‘black sheep’, saunters in halfway through his brother’s eulogy and brazenly strolls down to the front pew, ignoring the scandalised glances. He’s late, a whisper spreads, because he had a meeting with director James Toback. Wait. James Toback? Lame! The hearse leaves, and the congregants assemble on the street. An attractive brunette in her late forties weeps desolately. Did she know the deceased well? Not at all: she has discovered that someone at the service walked off with her Christian Dior trench and left her with a shabbier coat from a chainstore. All this happened

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Thinking inside the box

Someone once asked Joseph Cornell who was his favourite abstract artist of his time. It was a perfectly reasonable question to put to a man who numbered Piet Mondrian, as well as other masters of modernism, among his acquaintance. But, characteristically, Cornell veered off at a tangent. ‘What’, he replied, ‘do you mean “my time”?’ In its way it’s a good response, as the exhibition at the Royal Academy, Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust, makes clear. The subtitle of the show refers to travel in mental space. In mundane reality, Cornell (1903– 72) seldom left New York City, and never ventured further afield than Maine. But in his imagination, he journeyed across

John R. MacArthur

The man who wrecked New York

It is something of a mystery why the Bodley Head has decided to publish Robert Caro’s The Power Broker in Britain more than 40 years after the initial appearance in the US of this classic work — but better late than never. Caro’s remarkable portrait of New York City’s master planner Robert Moses merits publication in any language, at any moment in time. For its scope extends beyond Moses, fascinating though he was as a person, builder, wrecker, and manipulator of men and money. Caro’s ambition — in a journalistic sense equal to Moses’s ambition in architecture, park creation, and road and bridge construction — is greater than conventional biography.

Thursday

Taki

High life | 4 June 2015

The last week in Gotham was exceptional fun. I saw a Broadway play, Finding Neverland, compliments of the producer, my NBF Harvey Weinstein.It had me clapping with one hand due to the operation, and standing with the packed theatre for the ovation. Shows how much the critics who panned it know. The audience loved it, as did I. It’s an uplifting, wonderful play about J.M. Barrie and the children. Then there was the blind black guy in Brooklyn who told me, ‘You’re too pale for this neighbourhood.’ Go figure, as they say in that part of town. I’m always sad to leave the city, especially with the end of spring.

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Degrees of bureaucracy

It took Oxford 40 years to catch up with Cambridge in appointing a woman vice-chancellor, but Louise Richardson — ex-St Andrews, Irish, Catholic, terrorism expert — is to take over from the chemist Andrew Hamilton. He is leaving early to head New York University for an eye-watering £950,000 a year. His successor will inherit a more modest but still whopping £442,000 a year. That’s what happens when a university is run like a biggish corporation — the head is paid like a chief executive. (A professor gets around £65,000 a year: once, Louise Richardson would have been on something similar.) Chief of the problems Richardson has to get to grips

Thursday

Taki

High life | 21 May 2015

This is as good as it gets. A light rain is falling on a soft May evening and I’m walking north on a silent Park Avenue hoping to get into trouble. Fourteen thousand yellow taxis have turned Manhattan into a Bengali hellhole, blasting their horns non-stop, picking up or disgorging passengers in the middle of traffic-clogged streets, speeding and failing to yield to pedestrians as Big Bagel law requires. But on the Upper East Side, on a balmy evening, the yellow devils are causing havoc downtown, so I almost find myself singing in the rain as I head north far from the madding crowd.(Puns unintended.) Nicola’s is an Italian restaurant

Thursday

Taki

High life | 7 May 2015

If any of you sees Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, walking around with a begging bowl in his hand, it’s because he took me to dinner recently. I sort of went a bit nuts with the wine and the VF chief ended up with the bill. We went to a new Bagel restaurant, Chevalier, a futuristic marvel with great food and wine and even grander prices. New York is no longer elegant, and there are no longer society types dressed to the nines sitting on the banquettes and downing Manhattans. The Jewish ascendancy that downed the Wasps was as elegant as the one it replaced. William Paley, John

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 30 April 2015

I remember the first time that someone stood up and offered me a seat on the London Underground. It was in 2002, when I was 62 years old, and rather a pretty girl whom I had been quietly admiring through the crush on the Piccadilly Line suddenly rose to her feet and beckoned me to take her place. I was so shocked that I responded most ungraciously. I just shook my head in irritation and signalled to her to sit down again. For, notwithstanding the fact that my hair had long ago turned white, it was the first time I had realised that I actually looked old. From then on,

Nigel Lawson

Diary – 30 April 2015

I have escaped this rather depressing election campaign by retreating to my home in la France profonde — to be precise, in Armagnac, in the heart of Gascony. My only outing, from which I have just returned, was a brief visit to New York, travelling there and back in the giant Airbus 380. The purpose of the trip was to drum up US support for the thinktank I founded in 2009, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and its campaigning arm, the Global Warming Policy Forum, in the company of our outstanding director, Benny Peiser. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, the GWPF has a global reach, and its international

Thursday

Taki

High life | 23 April 2015

A recent column in the FT made me mad as hell. The writer, Simon Kuper, calls Vienna a backwater, which is a bit like calling the Queen a busted flush because of her age. Sure, he writes how great Vienna was back when the Habsburgs ruled the roost, attracting people from all over, ‘some of them nuts’. He includes Freud, Hitler, Stalin and Trotsky. Not the nicest bunch I can think of, but then the paper is a pink one. He fears London might go the way of Vienna, and price itself out of the reach of everyone but a few Chinese, Russian and Indian billionaires. He’s right about London

Tom Leonard

Shrunk

 New York City Nothing says New York like a psychoanalyst’s couch. Think Woody Allen or those New Yorker cartoons. It fits our perception of east-coast Americans as all neurotic and self-obsessed. But that mental picture needs updating, because traditional psychoanalysis is in dramatic decline in its traditional heartland. Across the urban US, in fact, the profession is dying out or having to change drastically. New figures from the American Psychoanalytic Association reveal that the average age of its 3,109 members is 66, up four years in a decade. More seriously, the average numbers of patients each therapist sees has fallen to 2.75. Some shrinks now never meet patients, dealing with

Monday

Kate Telfer

Joyce DiDonato, the New York Philharmonic and Alan Gilbert at the Barbican reviewed: ‘seductive’

We ought to have discovered Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Nyx (2011) before now. The dense orchestration was dappled with soupçons of indigenous music, folk, noir, Harryhausen Hollywood and French impressionism. The New York Philharmonic poured it all molten gold and plummy red and let it radiate about the auditorium. The premiere seemed to begin without its lighting engineer. All sat there fully lit, orchestra pounding away until the first decrescendo a few minutes in when the house was finally dimmed. If deliberate, it was rather gimmicky. Conductor Alan Gilbert put in a measured performance throughout but fell short of expressing a dedication to the full trajectory of each work. He didn’t bathe in any

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Mob rules

A spectre is haunting Europe — and knocking on the door of Downing Street. It has installed a president in France and a mayor in New York. It is causing mayhem in Spain and Greece and insurgency in Scotland and it may yet halt Hillary Clinton’s march to the White House. This idea — left-wing populism — is a radical, coherent and modern response to the financial crisis and the hardship suffered since. It is being effectively harnessed by Ed Miliband, taking him within touching distance of victory. And it may well become the creed that guides the next five years of British government. The Labour manifesto that was published

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Bad Jews at the Arts Theatre reviewed: strange, raw, obsessive and brilliant

Bad Jews has completed its long trek from a smallish out-of-town venue to a full-scale West End berth. Billed as a ‘hilarious’ family comedy it opens on a low-key note in a New York apartment where three cousins have gathered for grandpa’s funeral. Daphna is a puritanical vegan Jewess, training as a rabbi, who wants to move to Israel, marry a soldier and serve in the IDF. She’s insanely jealous of Jonah and Shlomo, whose parents have bought them a flat before either has found a job. Shlomo (who calls himself Liam) is a ‘bad Jew’ obsessed with Japanese culture who intends to marry out. He shows up at midnight

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

An Episcopalian vicar made me warm to the principle of women joining gentlemen’s clubs

In 1993, when I was living in Manhattan working for the New Yorker magazine, I was chosen as ‘distinguished visitor’ to be a temporary member of the Century Club: there were two of us in this category, me and the Tanzanian ambassador to the United Nations. The Century, in midtown Manhattan on West 43rd Street, is one of the grandest clubs in New York, most of which were opened in the 19th century in imitation of the gentlemen’s clubs of London. The Century was founded in 1846, only 15 years later than the Garrick Club, of which I have long been a member. It was originally planned as ‘an association

Monday

Robin Simcox

Will Gordon Brown’s critics finally admit he was right about al-Qaeda’s ‘major terrorist plot’?

There are not many things to celebrate about Gordon Brown’s time in office. He was a vilified leader; often quite rightly so. His Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, did not fare much better. However, a recent terror trial in New York showed that the criticism they received was not always deserved. On 8 April 2009, a large terrorist cell based in northwest England was arrested. The cell had been dispatched to the UK by al-Qaeda in 2006 in preparation for an attack, the majority entering the UK on bogus student visas. The plot is thought to have involved a car bomb attack against Manchester’s Arndale shopping centre, with a team of suicide

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

I’ve been sacked more times than I can exactly remember. It teaches you nothing

The Oldie magazine — of which, until otherwise advised, I appear to be the editor — runs an occasional article about someone’s experience of being sacked. When I was young, this used to carry something of a stigma: other people found it hard to believe that you could be sacked without having somehow deserved it. But since then so many admirable people have lost their jobs for no good reason that nobody thinks any the worse of them for it. And now we are told by Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue and queen of the fashion world for 27 years, that to be sacked is actually a good

Thursday

Susie Boyt

‘Another terrible thing…’: a novel of pain and grief with courage and style

Nobody Is Ever Missing takes its title from John Berryman’s ‘Dream Song 29’, a poem which I’d always thought related to Berryman’s strange sense of guilt over his father’s suicide. At the heart of Catherine Lacey’s novel there is another suicide that brings with it enormous pain and grief, that of the heroine Elyria’s adopted sister Ruby, six years earlier. This is a novel of extremes — to put it mildly — charting Elyria’s slide into a derelict state. It is a witty, knowing and lyrical work that takes as its subject the thoughts and feelings of a woman who has suffered more misery than most humans can take. The

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Love Is Strange review: subtle and nuanced in ways which, I’m assuming, Fifty Shades is not

You will be wondering why I haven’t seen Fifty Shades of Grey as this is very much Fifty Shades of Grey week and although I’m as curious and excited as anybody — how has Sam Taylor-Johnson filmed a book which, let’s face it, is quite a bit shit? — there were no UK media screenings prior to going to press. This means I will now have to pay and see it at the cinema, which is something, I know, you little people do all the time, but still, who does one go with? As it happens, my mother (86) expressed an interest, but I had to tell her: no way.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The Master of the Universe who taught me that life is about much more than money

God it’s nauseating when an exact university contemporary of yours turns out to have become a hugely successful investor with a fund worth many millions. The bit during our meeting where I most wanted to throw up my ravioli was when this fellow — Guy Spier his name is; read PPE at Brasenose with my old mucker Dave Cameron at the same time I was at Christ Church — told me how he’d once paid nearly £250,000 in a charity auction just for the privilege of having lunch with Warren Buffett. A quarter of a million quid. Imagine all the things you could do with that. I could make a thousand and