Taki

  Gstaad One possesses youth, talent, fame, even beauty, the other none of the above except arrogance, physical repulsiveness and a sexual impudence that fits perfectly into our pornocentric culture. Both, however, need to quit their respective professions, the former in order to preserve his great legacy, the latter to save the city of New

 Thun ‘Mokusoo!’ All 200 of us already on our knees and sitting on our heels in the Japanese ‘seiza’ position remain dead silent at the command. No loud breathing, no movement whatsoever, just ‘mizu no kokoro’, a calm mind, like the surface of undisturbed water. ‘Kaimoku’, the next command, signals the end of inner contemplation,

I am about to leave for karate camp in Thun, Switzerland, four days of double sessions lasting one hour and 45 minutes each, with 300 black belts from all over Europe and North America attending. I’ll give you all the details next week once I’m safely back home and on my way to the Greek

I remember it well. It was August 1952, and I was dining with my parents on the Palm Beach casino’s patio in Cannes, when my father got up and went inside to gamble. He came back rather excited and told us that a friend of his, a Greek ship owner by the name of George

The long lazy summer is upon us, and as I walk the Swiss hills below the mountain ranges my thoughts are always of the past, the long hot summers of long ago, girls in their pretty dresses, my father in his whites sailing around the Saronic Bay with a ball-and-chain standard flying from his main

What was that about London and being tired of life? Or that flickering ecstasy of a long ago memory of being drunk at dawn and watching people going to work? Surely not at my age and in the year 2013, but there you have it. You can go home again, Thomas Wolfe had it all

A first-round loser at Wimbledon this year will receive £23,000 for showing up. Back in 1957 I got £80 for losing in the singles qualifying draw and getting into the draws for the men’s doubles and mixed. Call it inflation, if you like, but today’s pros outside the top 100 need the moolah more than

St Tropez To the once upon a time sleepy fishing village, now the focal point for Russian oligarch excess, outrageously ugly super-yachts, and what is commonly known as the scum of the earth, the nouveaux-riches of the 21st century. Yet a tiny but perfect airport for small planes and jets means the 747s that the

‘Sexist mores of super-rich hurt us all,’ sobs an American female columnist in the New York Times. I don’t usually follow this kind of drivel — the sexist stuff, I mean — but a familiar name caught my bloodshot eye, so I read further. Apparently the sexist mores of the super-rich were exposed by the

Do any of you still like the dread word diversity, one that’s proudly flung around by those who squirm when the name of the great Enoch Powell comes up? If anything, Powell was a prophet, and after the latest London outrage, his so-called Rivers of Blood speech sure comes to mind. He got it right

Cannes It’s raining, the stars are hiding, the hacks and paparazzi are waterlogged and frustrated, and the shimmering images of the beautiful people walking up the red carpet are just that, images of glories long gone. The film festival used to be a glamorous affair when I was a young man. I remember the brouhaha

New York At an art shindig on Park Avenue, I spotted Baz Luhrmann, the director of the latest and very noisy version of The Great Gatsby. A charming man, I was told, just before I was shocked — shocked à la Captain Renault — to hear the dwarfish mayor of the Big Bagel suggest an

New York Life is definitely beautiful, as long as one can see, that is, which for two miserable days last week I couldn’t. Having had a glaucoma operation two months ago, I needed to use drops for a while but didn’t pay attention — too many girls in their summer dresses, and things like that

New York When Greek democracy was restored back in 1974, some ‘democratic’-leaning newspapers tried to criminalise my writings, so much so that I got 16 months in the pokey for ‘anti-Greek’ comments, whatever that meant. I did not serve the sentence, which was eventually thrown out on appeal, but left for London instead, and the

A nice package arrived by post just as I was going to ring a friend in London and inquire how old and how good a title is if the bearer uses it more often than a footballer says the F-word. I will not name the bum because I did a few weeks back and he