I suppose it’s a kind of solace during these snowy times that Norway, the country with the world’s highest per capita income, has not missed a single working day through inclement weather, and as I write there are 30 feet of snow covering the country. In some areas much more than 30 feet of the
Arnold Toynbee read Spengler’s The Decline of the West as a young historian at the University of London and had the same reaction as I did when I first read Hemingway. It blew his mind. He found it both exhilarating and dismaying. Exhilarating because of its historical insights, dismaying for it disposed of the questions
Let’s start 2010 right and mention a few honest people in the news. I wrote this sentence a couple of hours ago, not realising how difficult it was going to be to find even one honest boldfaced name. Like old Diogenes, I am still looking as my deadline nears. Which reminds me: at least the
Historically, at least in America, people who seek to thrive in the theatre, publishing, on Wall Street, in the media, or even on the gossip columns make their way to Manhattan. Once here, the climb begins, and it’s tougher than any mountain in Nepal. As E.B. White, the great Big Bagel chronicler, wrote, ‘All it
The hysteria over Tiger Woods is simply wonderful. Compared with Bill Clinton’s tarts, Tiger’s are of slightly better quality, which is not saying much. The prettiest of the lot, Rachel Uchitel, is something else. This is hard for me to admit, but she was at school with my daughter and I had actually noticed her
When the Marx Brothers announced in 1946 that their upcoming film was called A Night in Casablanca, Warner Bros threatened to sue for breach of copyright. Warner had produced the great hit Casablanca four years earlier, and insisted that the funny men were trying to cash in on it. But Groucho was no slouch. He
The fourth and last time I debated at the Oxford Union was three or four years ago, and it was a total disaster. The motion was that Katrina’s aftermath was Bush’s fault, and I was against it. A quarter of a century before that, Auberon Waugh and I had wiped out the opposition under the
It’s good to be in Texas. To a European like me, Texas is why we came to America. It’s a huge state, but more importantly it’s a state of mind. It is a fount of freedom and imagination. For most of the inhabitants of America’s two coasts, Texas is worse than flyover country. Texas represents
New York At an outdoor luncheon party in Sussex celebrating Willy Shawcross’s birthday some years ago, I asked his then 95-year-old father whom he found the most interesting man at Nuremberg. ‘Goering,’ was the monosyllabic reply. ‘I mean from both sides,’ I said. ‘Goering,’ said Lord Shawcross. He later told me how the Nazi would
New York ‘Why would he run for Parliament?’ screams the headline in the New York Times. A subheading lists ‘An inherited passion for women, gambling, the environment and politics’. As I start to read, I fear the worst, but as it turns out it could have been a lot worse. Zac Goldsmith’s name is big
New York One felt the backlash against the BNP–BBC fiasco all the way to the Big Bagel, with local papers commenting on the lynching of Nick Griffin by rent-a-crowd minorities. Even people who think England is in Canada heard about it and called the freak show unfair and stage-managed, confirming the perception that Britain is
New York Something’s bothering me about the Polanski business. No, unlike Harvey Weinstein and Bernard-Henri Lévy — not to mention that Mitterrand paedophile — I will not defend Roman’s actions with a 13-year-old, but I will say that, with friends like his making fools of themselves defending him, it will be a miracle if he
New York When A Moveable Feast was published in 1964 I had been living in Paris for six years. I was 27 and in love with Papa Hemingway’s favourite city, one that he described as ‘a mistress who always has new lovers’. One didn’t speak this way back then, but the book really blew my
New York They founded this place 400 years ago this year among the Indians in the marshes, and no one’s looked back since. Some of the Dutch descendants are still around but you wouldn’t know it by reading the gossip columns or celebrity blogs. This is immigrant paradise, and the less European one looks and
New York Cement barriers, stanchions, cop cars, motorcycles, black SUVs, flashing lights, bullhorn warnings to move to the side or else, mean-looking dudes in dark suits, dark glasses and talking into their cufflinks, a hobbit named Sarkozy jogging in Central Park to the exclusion of the rest of us, African dictator kleptocrats emptying jewellery shops
New York Irving Kristol, who died last week, was generally seen as the father of neoconservatism, a non-existent concept in Europe where we’re steeped in more traditional and less opportunistic politics. I once sat with him at a dinner in honour of William Buckley given by Drue Heinz in her east side townhouse. We were
There is a mordant Eskimo proverb that says a good butler is worth at least three wives. The only trouble being I’ve never heard of an Eskimo with a butler. Gianni Agnelli had two he couldn’t do without: Pasquale, until he reached 40, and then Bruno, until the ‘avvocato’s’ death. I inherited mine from the
Gstaad From my desk facing the garden I look out on a vista of wooded green hills with an unblemished blue background. Far beyond, the mountains are grey and white-capped on top. The sun is blazing, the cows are grazing, and I have to leave this paradise for karate and judo training in the Bagel.
Gstaad My Davis Cup partner Nicky Kalogeropoulos won both the Wimbledon and Roland Garros junior titles in 1963, and the following year, at four–all, 30–all in the fifth set against the French champion Pierre Darmon, signalled his opponent’s ball good after the umpire had called it out giving Nicky a breakpoint. He lost the match
Gstaad What I find quite fascinating is how Americans have a blind spot about their own flaws in the area of human rights, and how they feel they have a duty to lecture other countries on the issue. I am, of course, referring to the outrage over the Libyan deal, an outrage shared by most