Taki

New York It’s a black-and-white 1939 oldie starring Barbara Stanwyck and William Holden, in his first film. She is thin, ballsy, bawdy and beautiful, and talks with a Brooklyn accent. He’s tall, very good-looking, a professional boxer whose real love is playing the violin. His name is Joe Bonaparte. Joe and Babs are on the

‘Your future is in Hollywood. I can make you the next Bela Lugosi,’ said James Toback, looking me straight in the eye. Jimmy Toback is a hell of a fellow. An obsessive with an encyclopedic knowledge of sport and other data, he directed such great films as The Gambler, Fingers (it made Harvey Keitel into

I don’t know who was the dumber of the two: the Greek banker apparently rushing to spend 100 million big ones on a London pad, or the American woman who fell off a cliff in Alaska while busy texting? Both dummies survived, which goes to show that the Almighty must have a weakness for the

New York Ten years ago this week I put my money down and the American Conservative magazine was born. They say that owning a yacht is like sitting under a shower tearing up $100 bills. Owning an opinion magazine based in Washington DC is like sitting in a dull hotel room throwing $1,000 bills into

Nueva York The dateline is in Spanish because I have yet to hear any English spoken here in the Bagel, and I landed in some style more than 24 hours ago. Never mind. Flying at 47,000 feet at close to 500 knots per hour on a G550 is as close as it gets to perfection

Gstaad It was far, far worse than the Rodney King El Lay riots of 20 years ago, and it made last year’s London summer fires look like a kindergarten’s Guy Fawkes party. This was our Kristallnacht, and then some. They had hard faces, harder than a hedge fund manager’s when told a good corner table

Forty years or so ago, two Greek ship owners and the most famous diva of her time squared off in the British High Court over a financial dispute. Panaghis (I think) Vergottis, a gentleman and philanthropist, had sued Aristotle Socrates Onassis and Maria Callas over the ownership of a tanker, bought for la Callas by

With the exception of the French Academy immortals Michel Déon and Jean d’Ormesson, two wonderful writers and both the epitome of charm and graciousness, the French can be a pretty silly lot. They weren’t always. They got that way sometime between the two great wars, and turned even sillier during the German occupation and following

Gstaad My chalet lies far above the village of Gstaad, but I happened to be ‘en ville’ when I heard the pleasant sounds of an oompah band and saw the Swiss burghers dressed up in their finest Lederhosen marching through. It was a magnificent morning, the mountains glistening in the sun, the air fresh and

Gstaad If the London Olympics do not go down in history as the Crying Games, I will perform a sex act on Vladimir Putin in Piccadilly Circus as the clock strikes 12 next New Year’s Eve. Olympic winners’ tears made the place look like Niagara Falls at times, and with the floods up in Scotland

Thucydides carefully structured his Peloponnesian war history as a cautionary tale about the moral decay that accompanies abuses of imperial power. ‘It is a general law of nature to rule whatever one can,’ say the Athenians blandly to the denizens of Melos before slaughtering them. (The tiny island of Melos, a Spartan colony, had refused

Gstaad  Purity in a sport does not mix with popularity, and defending the former is anathema to the hucksters, crooks and profiteers who make up the latter. In this I do not include the sportswriters of serious newspapers, with whom I actually sympathise. They see what’s going on, but they have to report on sport

Gstaad  Mountains in summer are of an astral beauty, the snowy, far away, shrouded in cloud peaks like old men wearing spats. Danger lurks with such men, as it does with mountains. Colin Thubron wrote about a certain peak in Tibet, and claimed that the God of Death dwelled on that particular mountain. One could

Dare I encroach on James Delingpole’s TV territory and ask what has happened to Wimbledon? A crying jag in public would surely have embarrassed Baron von Cramm, a three-time losing finalist, not to mention Rod Laver, Roy Emerson and John Newcombe, all three multiple winners of the crown. Back in my time, Lew Hoad won

The Spectator lost one of its most loyal readers when Alistair Londonderry, Marquess of, died recently of that most dreaded pancreatic cancer, the very same that had killed his brother-in-law Jimmy Goldsmith 15 years before. Alistair would have been 75 in September, an age that Jimmy never even got close to. Sir James once told

On Board S/Y Bushido, off Corsica  For the past three days I’ve been watching people aged 110 years old prancing around bareheaded under a sun so fierce no Taleban warrior would ever emerge from under his camel. I tried to speak to the captain of one of these megaships, but he mistook me for a

It is very still as I sit down to write, the atmosphere heavy and oppressive. They say time flies, but less so if one looks backwards. One thousand years before Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, Emperor Justinian was embarrassed to discover that his Greek subjects were not paying their taxes. Cheating officialdom has

On board S/Y Bushido I made a resolution long ago never to mention the Olympics — its spirit is on a par with that of Madame Claude, of Paris brothel infamy — but resolutions are made to be broken. With an uncle who competed in Los Angeles in 1932 and Berlin in 1936, and a

On board S/Y Bushido However you cut it, Greek demagogues are bluffing that the faceless suits of Brussels will give in to the blackmail and fold their hand. Greeks are gamblers to start with, and some are even very good poker players. The tragedy is that the very same criminals who ruined the country to