If any more proof were needed that Brexit is the best thing to happen to Britain since 1066 and all that, here it is: Geologists have at last assembled a picture of the forces that tore a 10 million-year-old land bridge away and turned Britain into an island, rather than a peninsula of Europe like ...
If the Clintons were not as down-market as they are, they would have fit in perfectly in 15th-century Florence, the city that gave us Botticelli and Cellini, and also the Medici, the Borgia, and, of course, Machiavelli. Renaissance Florence was not confined to painting and literature; quite the ...
NEW YORK—Things that I once loved (Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, brownstone terraces on hot summer afternoons, cold beer and fried eggs on 59th and 5th at 5 a.m. after a night of carousing, the Sherry-Netherland) and miss today have grown ever more monumental upon reflection. I suppose it’s ...
I’d gladly exchange waistlines with him if he’d teach me to cut a phrase the way he does—in print, that is. I’m talking about none other than The Spectator’s “Brute” Anderson, whose style of writing I particularly admire but find impossible to emulate. But I have an excuse: English is ...
My last week in the Alps, with the snow gone, replaced by brilliant sunshine, and the silence broken by the occasional clear, sharp wind. The town is now empty and clean, and the air bracing. I love the village out of season, the shoppers finally gone, the locals preparing to free the cows to get ...
William F. Buckley spent his adult winter months in Rougemont, an alpine resort next to its chicer neighbor Gstaad, now a mecca for the nouveaux riches and vulgar. Throughout the "60s and "70s, however, the area was known for its music festival run by Yehudi Menuhin, and for celebrity ...
A cloudless sky. Crunchy spring snow. Longer, warmer days—I finally got in some good skiing, twisting around moguls like an arthritic champ. It’s all in the mind, as my old wrestling coach would tell me: If you think the other guy’s better, you’re bound to lose to him. The same goes for the ...
At a chic dinner party last week, a friendly chow—as big and black as a dog can be without being a bear—sniffed a lady’s bum during a predinner drink. I happened to be standing behind the lady, and she raised her hand in anger. “It’s Bessie the dog,” I stammered. “What is wrong with ...
A lousy fortnight if ever there was one. Two great friends, Lord Belhaven and Stenton and Aleko Goulandris, had their 90th-birthday celebrations, and I missed both shindigs because of this damn bug. Lord Belhaven’s was in London, at the Polish Club, but flying there was verboten. Robin Belhaven ...
Who was it who said that behind every great fortune lies a great crime? The answer is a Frenchman by the name of Balzac, known as a pretty good novelist in his time. Well, is stealing an idea and making untold billions as a result a great crime? I suppose if it were my idea and some ghastly nerd ...
