On board S/Y Bushido My moment of glory came and went in a jiffy, actually a whole afternoon of filming on board without a single retake, temper tantrum or the expected fight between the star, Alec Baldwin, and yours truly. The name of the movie is Seduced and Abandoned, and it has nothing to do
Miami Beach I thought it a good time to visit, neither spring break debauchery nor fashionista pretence time. So I signed up yet again for the judo championships, trained very hard and flew down with four buddies hoping to stay in a family hotel near the water, a bit like Bogie stopping at a place
New York So, Sarko and Bruni are out, Hollande is in and I’m off to the Actor’s Studio to brush up on my acting lessons. (Stanley Kowalski is reborn. Stella!) I wonder whether DSK is thinking: ‘There but for an African maid go I.’ My friend Edward Jay Epstein has written a quickie book about
New York I have settled into my Bagel routine as if I had never been away: up early, a 25-minute walk through the park, one hour of judo working with three opponents, walk back, have breakfast and collapse with the newspapers. In the evening it is karate with Richard Amos and a couple of other
The first friend I made at Lawrenceville School was called Reuben Batista, eldest son of the Cuban strongman. He was older and in a ‘Circle house’, whereas I was in lower school. Being foreigners gave us something in common, the rest of the school being mostly Wasps with a few Catholics thrown in for good
New York Seeing Manhattan rising in the distance is always a treat. I am not sure it’s possible for anyone brought up around these parts to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, meant to us who came from the old continent. I was 11 years old and had seen only war
Papa Hemingway’s recently published letter to an Italian male friend revealed his human side, one all of his admirers were always aware of (like Bogie, tough on the outside, jelly on the inside). Until lately, Papa haters had a good long run. Soon after Carlos Baker’s matchless biography appeared around 1970, nine years after Hemingway’s
Dr David Starkey is a great man, a Tudor historian, and one of the few academics who tells it like it is. Openly gay, he has no time for prancing queens and other such clown minorities trying to steal a bigger slice of the freebie pie. After last summer’s riots he had the courage to
The story thus far: in the 18 February issue of the greatest weekly in the world I wrote that I had fallen madly in love with Jessica Raine, the actress who portrays nurse Jenny in the Sunday-night BBC television show Call the Midwife. In the throes of demonic, erotic exhilaration, I may have piled it
Gstaad It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, with a 24-hour non-stop snowfall, an empty main street, and the closing of the Palace hotel as well as of the Eagle club. (I give the traditional closing-day speech at the club, and this year’s was judged to have been politically incorrect.) The older I get
Who first declared that nothing counts a lot and very little counts at all? The cynic and sesquipedalian Alastair Forbes claimed it, but he spoke with a forked tongue. Iris Murdoch hinted that it was hers, but she, too, was known for bending it. It doesn’t really matter because the saying is utter crap. A
Back in 1951, briefly home from boarding school, I went to a bar with a phony draft card, ordered a beer and watched Rocky Marciano knock out my idol Joe Louis through the ropes and out of boxing for ever. Joe was old — 35 or maybe 37 and was trying for a comeback as
Gstaad It’s early in the morning and very still in the silvery light of the heights up here as I look out my window. A company of wispy white clouds hide behind the surrounding mountains — a reminder that a perfect dawn makes for a perfect day’s skiing. The clouds play games. They wrap themselves
Who is worse, the pusher or the addict? I’d say it’s 50–50 as they sustain each other, although the addict has the moral high ground. Greece is the addict, and the pushers are German and French banks, with Brussels the overall godfather shipping the stuff in from Afghanistan. The godfather is not the cuddly type
Gstaad Here we go again! ‘I hear music and there’s no one there, I smell blossoms and the trees are bare, all at once I seem to walk on air…’ Some of you, or perhaps all of you, must be getting rather tired of this, but I simply can’t help it. I’m not doing it
At ten minutes past four on the afternoon of 28 April 1945, a plumber by the name of Moretti shot and killed a prematurely aged man and a youngish woman, who was not wearing any underwear, in front of the Villa Belmonte, near Lake Como. Next to Moretti, who was later tried for theft and
Gstaad OK, sports fans! The Davos irrelevance is over, Gstaad is covered with the white stuff, and in St Moritz the Russian crooks are laying a Stalingrad-like siege to the town’s ultra-expensive boutiques. So what else is new? Gstaad covered with snow, that’s what’s new. Let’s start with Davos, where publicity-seekers such as George Soros
Edmund Wilson was America’s premier man of letters (The Wound and the Bow) during the mid years of the 20th century. To the Finland Station and Memoirs of Hecate County are still in print, as are his journals about the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. He was a literary critic par excellence, a friend of both
Gstaad ‘Mick Flick invites you to the Roaring Twenties’ read the invite, a black-and-white stiffy with a flapper and a Rudolph Valentino type in white tie and tails, flirting in the old-fashioned manner, she dreamlike, flapping her eyes upwards, he looking swarthy and passionate and standing over her. In the background, a roomful of swells
Gstaad By the time you read this it will be mid-January and all your New Year’s resolutions will have gone the way of good manners or mild racist remarks. At least I hope so. Resolutions can be dangerous to one’s health, and definitely a hazard to one’s happiness. Here in snow-covered Gstaad — we’ve had