Listing page content here Athens On a sad trip to Athens for my friend Yanni Goulandris’s funeral. Throughout the years, mostly in these pages, I have always referred to him as Professor Yohannes Goulandris, mind you, mostly to annoy him. Yanni did not think much of the Germans, the reason being he was 15 when
Cannes If the truth, space and good taste allowed it, the heading of this column would be ‘My Cannes night of lust with Halle Berry’. Before her agent reaches the offices of Sue, Grabbit & Run, the Oscar-winner and I did not, alas, hit it off in bed, and it was mostly her fault. But
Why is it that every time I leave New York I die a little? I know it sounds corny, but I do. I suppose it’s because it was that first great magic city I came upon after the war. The great beaux-arts and art-deco apartment towers looming in the distance, the magisterial Rockefeller Center and,
New York I’m in the middle of rereading Storm of Steel, Ernst Jünger’s account of his first world war experience, which was published in 1920 and immediately made him famous. No writer has ever claimed to have had Jünger’s experience of warfare, and no soldier has ever written with such sincerity, nobility and grace about
New York As they say, one couldn’t make it up, not even in Hollywood, which is where this Chandleresque saga took place. Ronald Burkle, the supermarket billionaire who has accused a minion at the New York Post of shaking him down, does not look like much, but then billionaires tend not to nowadays. Shakedowns seek
Do any of you remember a film called The Blue Max? It is about a German flying squadron during the first world war. A working-class German soldier manages to escape trench warfare by joining up with lots of aristocratic Prussian flyers who see jousting in the sky as a form of sport, rather than combat.
Palm Beach This place is good news for senior citizens everywhere. It is the Mecca for the rich where even my old friend David Metcalfe is considered middle-aged. It is also one of the few resorts in America where religion counts a hell of a lot. In fact, this is what Palm Beach is all
In an age of corporate looting, insider trading, commercial gouging and crass commercialism, it is well to ask why we are picking on Didier Drogba for cheating. One tries to emulate one’s betters, and, as Matthew Norman wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, when a co-owner of Birmingham City has done time for pimping and makes
Gstaad The end of another perfect season where skiing is concerned. Wonderful powder snow, beautiful sunshine, plunging temperatures at night and empty slopes once the glitzy types went back to whatever holes they came from. On my son’s last day here, he and I skied recklessly fast together (I couldn’t keep up) and late in
If I told you I was skiing with a friend in the Swiss Alps last week, and my friend had been skiing in Iraq two days before that, you’d probably think I’d been smoking exotic cheroots, but you’d be wrong. Peter Galbraith is the son of Ken Galbraith, Harvard professor, writer, economist, ex-ambassador to India
Gstaad I wrote this last week, as we’re going to press early. It seems everyone who is anyone is staying up late on Sunday night in order to watch the Oscars, and cheer for the gay western which has been nominated for eight Academy Awards. I have not seen Brokebutt Mountain, but I hear that
Ancona I am here on a pilgrimage, honouring the descendants of this greatest of Italian towns, men like Galileo, Michelangelo, Dante and, of course, Matthew d’Ancona, considered among those in the know the greatest Anconan of them all. Just kidding. I’m in Gstaad, and just did three runs before breakfast, because the plebs have arrived
Gstaad I am personally in touch with British Muslim leaders and appealing to them to spare the life of my friend Claus von B
To Harrow, the most heroic of public schools, for a speech about the press, probably among the least defensible of professions. I say the most heroic because Harrow lost 644 boys in the Great War, more than any other public school, I believe. One enters the building where I spoke about the unspeakable through a
Rome They say that the invading Barbarians were so overwhelmed by the Pantheon’s beauty that they didn’t take it apart brick by brick. It is, of course, the most perfectly symmetrical monument, along with the Parthenon, to have survived since antiquity, the former lucky enough not to have been blown up à la latter. The
Gstaad On the evening that Charles Kennedy resigned, Barry and Lizzie Humphries came to dinner. My German cook Alexander made a special cake for Dame Edna, but Barry smelled a rat. He asked if the cake contained any alcohol. The answer was almost none at all. ‘Well,’ said the great man, who has not had
Liberal columnists, especially in London, New York and Los Angeles, can’t quite grasp why some Christians get upset about people saying ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Happy Christmas’. ‘People who use the word holiday now face angry Christian protests,’ they assert. Well, if they have faced such protests, it’s news to me. Most Christians I know
New York My last week in the Bagel and then back to good old London. And it’s just as well I’m still here, or some of Sunny Marlborough’s children might take a swipe at me. Last week I wrote about the old duke, correctly calling him Sunny, a diminutive which derives from Sunderland, one of
New York A letter to the mother of my children from the greatest living French writer, Michel Déon, one of the 40 immortals of the French Academy, shows me to be a philistine. Michel kindly points out that Mozart’s Don Juan was inspired by a Molière play, not by a Beaumarchais one, as I wrote
New York I thought Catherine Meyer made the week’s most intelligent remark: ‘If Cabinet ministers can sell their memoirs, why can’t civil servants?’ Or words to that effect. She’s a good German, probably the old-fashioned kind, but the old-fashioned kind has been unpopular since the war, although never with me. Now she’s more unpopular than