New York To Roxbury, Connecticut, a tiny, beautiful village covered in leafy verdure and straight out of a black-and-white film from the Forties depicting white, Christian, innocent America. But, wait a minute: white, Christian, waspy, thrifty Americans did not drive turbo Bentleys worth a quarter of a million quid, did not employ discreet minders to
New York A letter from an English couple, who are long-time friends of mine, arrived, thanking me for lending them my London flat. (They live in America.) ‘We also managed to fit in a wedding near Oxford and a long private chat with the Queen at Windsor…who, in contrast to the incumbent at the White
New York I Married a Princess is among the most embarrassing reality shows to have appeared on American television, which makes it unique in view of the garbage which fill the airways 24 unrelenting hours per day. The format is a simple one: a man and his wife and their small children spend their days
Trust Tony Blair to call an election the day after The Spectator goes to press: 5 May is a lousy day for conservatives the world over. Karl Marx was born 5 May 1818 in Trier, the Rhineland. The only good thing about the date took place in 1816, when ‘O Solitude’, John Keats’s first published
New York Happiness is a German pope succeeding the greatest pope ever, a Pole. Not everyone agrees with me. Blogger Andrew Sullivan, a Brit expatriate and gay-rights advocate, called it a ‘full-scale assault’ on liberal Catholics. If he is a typical liberal Catholic, he has just doubled my joy at Benedict XVI’s election. Fifty years
New York The founder of the Dorothy Parker society, Kevin Fitzpatrick, recently wrote to the F. Scott Fitzgerald society inviting its members to an Algonquin hotel cocktail party, a gracious gesture worthy of old Scott himself. The Fitzgerald types did not even bother to answer. Back in his day, that would have constituted a casus
New York It’s all over but the shouting, as they say in the Bagel, but bitchy British tabloids had nothing on the locals where Chuck and his bride were concerned. Call it envy, call it republicanism, but, wink-wink, the Yankee press had a field day. Tina Brown, an expatriate Brit who passes as an English
New York Thirty-five years or so ago, William Buckley received an unexpected telephone call from one John Lennon. Intrigued, Bill listened while the John Lennon himself — with his Japanese wife blabbering away in the background — pleaded with him for help in remaining in the Land of the Free. Lennon had had a drug
Nemmersdorf is a village in East Prussia that was overrun by the Soviets in the autumn of 1944. After seizing the village, the Russkies raped all the women, regardless of age, and then crucified them. All of them. Men and children were clubbed to death or run over with tanks. Not a single person survived.
Gstaad Skiing without poles accentuates the new carving technique, which uses one’s edges and the upper body to turn. During the 1950s we checked before a bump, planted the pole, unweighted the skis and turned. Then came the Austrian technique of weddle, which involves a shifting of the hips while keeping the body straight on
A letter to the editor from Frederick Forsyth takes me to task. Enough about Gstaad is its message. OK, but only because it’s you, Freddy baby. Instead, I will treat you to a rivet-by-rivet description of tattooed oiks and thick-ankled slappers puking their guts out in urine-drenched Manchester pubs, my one thousand and one nights
In the American Conservative, Leon Hadar asks, ‘Is it possible that a homeless and failed artist from Vienna, a paranoid gangster from Georgia, and a paedophile and drug addict from Beijing led to the ruin of millions and millions of lives?’ Hadar is reviewing a book by William Pfaff which he compares to drinking a
Gstaad I’ve been wondering how people like Tony Blair, Michael Howard and assorted busybodies would react if some concentration-camp guard sued Ken Livingstone for comparing him to a British journalist. I don’t think there are any German ones around, but surely there are gulag concentration-camp guards still alive and kicking, and most of them are
Gstaad Far be it from me to give advice to the Queen — last I heard she is one wise and experienced lady — but she’s dining this week with the 13-member IOC evaluation commission, which is charged with judging the various bids of cities trying to land the 2012 Olympic Games. Feign sickness, Ma’am,
Gstaad Sir Roger and Lady Moore braved a snowstorm but made it on time driving from Crans-Montana. Sir Peter Tapsell flew in from Britain, snow or no snow on the runways. The poor little Greek boy had to travel less than a mile, but was the last to get there. While Gstaad was being covered
Gstaad Nothing like the flu to remind one of life’s priorities. It’s health, stupid, with everything else a very distant second. No woman, not even Ashley Judd or Jemima Khan, could get me out of bed and into theirs with a 40
New York Lest there be some of you that missed it, a lifelong dirty dealer is walking around us free as a bird, and there’s nothing any of us who don’t flout the law can do about it. Let’s start the new year right and not be beastly to Mr Marc Rich. He is the
I suppose winning the Nobel Prize for curing cancer would get me more brownie points, but being the man who took Jemima Khan to High Table at Trinity College, Oxford, feels almost as good. She’s something, that Jemima. Thin but voluptuous, with legs that remind me of Marlene Dietrich’s gams in Morocco, that black-and-white oldie
Back in London for a debate at the Intelligence Squared Forum on the motion that monogamy is bad for the soul. I am arguing against it, as well I should. Had I not wasted my life and time chasing women non-stop, I could have been a contender, a somebody. As the 20th century’s greatest philosopher,
New York With the exception of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg — whose circle of defenders and sympathisers have just come together at the Museum of Jewish Heritage here for a new documentary celebrating their martyrdom — there is no greater Cold War icon than Alger Hiss, the patrician, high-ranking state department official who passed government