On board S/Y Bushido According to C.M. Bowra, gold had a divine association with the Ancient Greeks, being more than just a symbolic value, as when Pindar wished to stress the splendour of something he called it golden, whether it was a victor’s crown of wild olives or the opening of a song. Gold stood
Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the art of seduction On board S/Y Bushido The smell of pine wafting from the shore, the whitewashed and sun-bleached terracotta houses shimmering in the midday heat — both remind me of the simple island life during the good old days, before super yachts, oligarchs and the brain-jolting cacophony of modern music
On board S/Y Bushido The thickly pine-forested hills form a perfect backdrop to the not so wine-dark waters off the Peloponnese. Soft greens and blues are Edward Hopper colours — as is the yellowish-white sunlight at midday, the inviolate stillness of noon being a keynote of his paintings. The sea in Greece is mystically wedded
Taki lives the High life On board S/Y Bushido, off Corfu From my porthole I can see Roger Taylor — drummer of Queen — talking to his three blonde and beautiful daughters. The eldest, Rory, has just become a doctor, the other two are still kids, and there are also two very talented boys, not
Taki lives the High life Porto Montenegro My friend John Sutin, the world’s most generous man, could not believe his ears. The Tivat airport in Montenegro was full and his private jet was not allowed to land. ‘Try Dubrovnik,’ was the message. So we did, the Croatian airport welcoming us by rushing us through customs
Exactly 50 years ago last Friday night going into Saturday morning — 1 July into the 2nd — in Ketchum, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway asked his wife Mary to sing an Italian song, ‘Tutti mi chiamano bionda’, everyone calls me blondie. After they had both gone up to bed he silently padded down the stairs, stepping
Isle of Ischia On a bright, windy June morning the church bells of this beautiful island rang out in welcome to the most egregious concourse of sailing boats to have arrived off its shores since Commodore Thomas Troubridge sailed into the bay of San Angelo in 1799. Troubridge, who under the command of Lord Nelson
Frankfurt The worst part is the weigh-in. Hundreds of heavily muscled, cauliflower-eared, tattooed, menacing-looking, sweaty men — from Mongolia, Korea, Japan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Greece, Germany, Brazil, Canada, France, Hungary, the US, you name it — wait patiently and silently to step on the scales. Everyone holds his passport, which he is
On board S/Y Bushido I am writing this under extreme torture. I have been vomiting for hours due to food poisoning, am totally dehydrated, but even one gulp of water brings on more violent up-chucks. ‘You’ll just have to wait it out,’ says a doctor over the telephone. Easier said than done. And to think
Here’s the definitive scoop on poor old Hellas, better known nowadays as the EU country that missed its day at the municipal dump. Greece will default sometime in 2012 and, if there are any doubters around, tell them this comes from the great economist Taki, the very same Taki who smelled a rat even before
Taki lives the High life New York Summertime and, as the song tells us, ‘the livin’ is easy’. The temperature is in the nineties, girls’ dresses are at their flimsiest, love is in the air, and sex is everywhere, so what else can one wish for? This is my last week in the Bagel, and
New York In that wonderful old Broadway musical Guys and Dolls, gambler Sky Masterson is romancing Sister Sarah Brown of the Salvation Army after an all-nighter of boozing it up in Havana. Walking her home to her mission in New York, he tells her that the only place in the world where ‘the dawn is
Orlando A neutron bomb hit this place just as I got off the aeroplane, killing all humans but leaving the buildings standing. It was a horrid, unpardonable crime, and for it I blame the scientists. But not for the reasons you think. They should have done it the other way round. Kill the buildings, save
Why would a German playboy-billionaire industrialist with a large family and lots of old and good friends have dinner in Gstaad with one of his closest buddies, then go up to his chalet and put a bullet in his brain? As of writing, Gunter Sachs’s suicide is a mystery. But Gunter was always somewhat mysterious,
Mme Nhu, who died two days before THE wedding, was a hell of a woman. Her maternal grandmother was a Vietnamese princess of impeccable credentials, yet when she was captured by the commies in Hue in 1946, she stood up to them until the French rescued her four months later. She was anti-French and anti-commie,
New York How fair a rule is monarchy? A Byzantine scholar wrote that it was the fairest, to the point that God sustained it, as long as the emperors were elected by the army or an aristocratic senate. With their coronation, legitimate successors and usurpers alike automatically became sacred. The ancient Greeks went a step
New York On Tuesday last, 12 April, 150 years ago, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces fired the first shots on Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbour, South Carolina. The bombardment lasted 36 hours, with Fort Sumter occasionally replying with fire of its own. Then the white flag went up and the Union troops
New York I went to see a revival of Arcadia in the beautiful Ethel Barrymore Theatre last Saturday night, and it made my day. Tom Stoppard is our greatest playwright, and I think Arcadia is his best play, although a couple of other gems of his come close. I was with Marine Major Michael Warring
New York They say that when sexual attraction sets in all other brain functions shut down. It’s nature’s way of ensuring procreation. My brain shut down last week — and for a Hollywood actress, to boot. Of German extraction, Sandra Bullock is not the classic Aryan goddess, but most attractive in the flesh, more so
Twenty-two years or so ago, I wrote a column for the New York Observer, a weekly paper owned by a tycoon named Arthur Carter, a man who had come up the hard way and had made his fortune on Wall Street, but one who had retained his loathing for those who had made it the