Taki

New York America’s diminished intellectualism has made this interminable election period as boring as a Nat Rothschild Corfu party for respectable folk. Part of the problem is that presidential candidates try ‘to reach out to younger voters’, hardly an admirable goal as demographic researchers have gone the way of TV programmers, targeting young morons whose

New York ‘Oligarchs brace for a downturn,’ screams a New York business headline, a fact that sends me rushing to buy hankies, now selling at a premium at every corner store. Bloomberg News calculates that the richest 25 Russians on the Forbes list have lost a collective $230 billion since last March. Which means that

New York Peggy Noonan was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and is a graceful essayist and good Catholic lady who happens to be a political conservative. I haven’t seen her in years but sometimes we exchange emails. She has written a book about how badly Americans need Patriotic Grace, the title of her opus, and

New York The war on terror, as the most inarticulate man ever to inhabit the White House calls it, has now lasted longer than the second world war. And take it from Taki, it’s not going away, not in my lifetime, that’s for sure. Insurgencies have a tendency to wear out their enemy and eventually

In praise of older women When I read that actor Robert Wagner had had a four-year-long affair with Barbara Stanwyck back in 1952, my first reaction was that of envy and more envy. Wagner is 77 this year and Babs would have been 101, so when they were canoodling together he was 22 and she

The party’s over, it’s time to call it a day. They’ve burst your pretty balloon and taken the moon away. It’s time to wind up the masquerade. Just make your mind up, the piper must be paid. The party’s over, the candles flicker and dim. You danced and dreamed through the night, It seemed right

Gstaad Walking up mountains is not only healthy, it gives a man time to think. In fact, climbing in solitude offers one marvellous inner adventures, with epiphanies being the order of the day. There are no boulders where I climb, just a lot of green, steep hills separated by gorges, with lots of cows to

Regensburg The mighty Danube begins in the park of the Furstenberg Palace and flows eastward for a distance of 2,000 miles across ten countries on to the Black Sea. Last weekend, Prince and Princess Heinrich von Furstenberg, the titular heads of the family who live in that palace, gave us a little tour of Walhalla,

Gstaad ‘Goblins and devils have long vanished from the Alps, and so many years have passed without any well-authenticated account of a discovery of a dragon that dragons too may be considered to have migrated.’ So the Alpine Club was informed in May 1877 by Mr Henry Gotch, the secre-tary, and the news set off

Gstaad I’ve written this before on these here pages: Israel in cahoots with the Americans is going to bomb Iran before the 4 November US elections. How do I know, especially after sitting on a sailing boat for six weeks? That’s an easy one. Over the years I’ve made some pretty good contacts in Washington,

That’s not fair play On board S/Y Bushido As far as I’m concerned, the less said about the goings on in Beijing the better. I know, I know, I’ll be watching the judo and the athletics, especially the former (there are no drug cheats in judo, no money under the table, no money, pure and

On board S/Y Bushido Sailing into Athens, renamed ‘cemento-polis’ by green-loving Athenians, can be a traumatic experience, for one’s crew, that is. Coming in from the west, crossing Pireaus, my German cook Daniel could not believe his eyes. ‘Was ist das? Das ist furchtbar, abscheulich!’ Daniel is young, a very good cook and as good

On board S/Y Bushido Around 20 years or so ago, Udai Hussein, Saddam’s boy, had some of his heavies beat up a man who refused their master’s invitation to join his table in a Geneva nightclub. The Iraqi wanted to meet the man’s beautiful companion, hence the invite. Although arrested, Udai got away with it

Corfu The Ionian islands are softer, greener and more feminine than those of the Aegean, and Corfu in particular was used by Homer as the setting of one of the most beautiful episodes of ‘The Odyssey’, the meeting of Odysseus with Nausicaa. For any of you with short memories of the classics, Odysseus was washed

The sea surface is smooth and mirror-like, and from the deck of Bushido I scan the coastline for the mother and baby porpoises who live inside a blue-green grotto off Assos, the tiny village which clings to a small isthmus between the island and a huge, forested pine hill crowned by a ruined 15th-century fort.

I’m afraid that Pug’s Club ‘Turd of the Year’ award went unanimously to the ghastly Andy Murray, he of the centre court primal screams and primate fist pumping. Perhaps his mother, who looks straight out of central casting of a Hollywood stage mum, and then some, should file his teeth down a bit and make

‘My legs are leaden, my throat is dry and I feel slightly sick with anxiety. As I make my way towards the arena the roar of the crowd gets louder. One question keeps edging into the small part of my mind which is functioning normally: what on earth are the combatants going through if I

By the time you read this I will have a pretty good idea whether my 70-and-over judo world title will belong to some Mongolian monster or be retained by yours truly. Unpredictability is to sport what lying is to Clinton and Blair — a compelling stimulus — but my chances in Brussels are beginning to

Just 555 short years ago last month, troops led by Mehmed II broke through the walls of the ancient Christian capital of Constantinople, ending a gallant defence by Constantine Paleologos, the last king of Byzantium. Just five even shorter days ago, a portly barrister and a ten-year-old almost pulled off the greatest cricket upset ever,