GSTAAD—As the great Yogi Berra explained, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” The great one also contributed the following wisdom: “You can observe a lot by watching.” Yogi came to mind as high inflation and a recession loom, and merry old England’s trade unions are reverting to type and ...
CORONIS—I suppose there’s always a first time, and looking back it was bound to happen. I scrambled off a sailing boat and took the coward’s way out after being bashed about by an angry Poseidon and a furious Aeolus. Actually it was the wife who couldn’t take it anymore and I simply went ...
An F. Scott Fitzgerald biographer by the name of David Brown refers to America’s promotion of deviancy (my words) as “the great post Appomattox launch toward materialism.” I liked that line and was thinking about it as I left the boat early morning and walked into an almost perfect Greek ...
PATMOS—Judging by the news, the world is finally coming apart: Chinese lab escapee Covid is still going strong, the monkeypox plague is targeting gays, record heat waves are crippling Europe and America, mass shootings are becoming a way of life in the U.S., there’s a war of attrition in the ...
I now find resorts more fun out of season. Civilized tourists are as rare as an intelligent Hollywood movie, so local talent will do nicely, and to hell with the vulgar jet set. Gstaad is perfect in June and July, March and April, as are St. Moritz, the Ionian Islands, and Patmos, my next ...
Michael Beloff QC and past president of Trinity College Oxford has just had his memoir reviewed in The Spectator, and it brought back memories. Here’s this really good man, the type who does the work, believes in the system, plays by the rules, and subscribes to the old graces of courtesy and ...
Now that the weakest Wimbledon since 1973—the year of the boycott—is over, a few thoughts about Pam Shriver’s recent revelations that her coach Don Candy, deceased, was also her lover. Candy was 50 at the time, while Pam was 17, which in my book made Candy a lucky guy, if it was legal. The ...
Looking back and trying to choose which among all the incomparably bewitching ones of my youth can be tricky. Giselle was definitely one of them—blond, French, mesmeric, an Aryan apparition—but so was Kiki, very white-skinned, also French, patrician, and very sexy. They were friends, those two, ...
As speaker at a posh dinner given by Jonathan and Jake Goedhuis, the best U.K. wine merchants by far, and attended by many swells including Anthony Mangnall MP, I somehow managed to finish the speech despite having tasted some very good wines beforehand. I nevertheless got lots of mileage from the ...
It’s nice to be back in the old continent again, especially after getting within a couple hundred yards of the phoniest bunch of Hollywood East types, fakes with names like Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff, and their ilk. It made me fly out from the Bagel without mixed feelings for a change. America has ...
