Temple of Poseidon, Sounion, Greece

Black Shirt Banter

I am writing this from the birthplace of (selective) democracy 2,500 years ago, the Athenians having the noose to limit voting rights to intelligent men capable of distinguishing between what is true and what is false. They were very wise, those Athenians; they even elected leaders by drawing lots, ...

Harvey Keitel

Bad Actors

Michael Mailer, son of the great novelist Norman Mailer, is a Harvard grad, a liberal, and an outstanding amateur boxer who advanced further in the Golden Gloves competition than any other Harvard wimp ever has or ever will, for that matter. Michael is a talented film director and producer who has ...

Donald Trump

Character Assassination

Gee whiz, how soon they forget, and how the headlines change quicker than a pole dancer’s favors from a sucker tossing twenty-dollar bills to the one with the C-notes. I am referring to last week’s captions about Biden’s mumbling and rambling, the creepy whispering, the misnomers and ...

Tower Bridge, London

The Figures Don’t Lie

On the Fourth of July last week I celebrated the world’s most exclusive club, Pugs, with my fellow members at a London venue. I had crossed over the Atlantic the day before and missed the fireworks that commemorate the most important revolution to date. 248 years ago the colonists had had enough ...

Clare Boothe Luce

Tribute to an Angel

I met two out of the three women I’ve most admired, and who lived during my lifetime, the one I never encountered having recently passed away. Margaret Thatcher (and her husband, Sir Dennis) stayed with me in Gstaad, the alpine Swiss village that used to be a paradise before Russian and Arab ...

Confusion in the Land of Cheese

Ooh là là, there’s an election about to take place in the land of cheese and everyone’s commenting about it as if North Korea suddenly decided to go democratic. French elections are like the cancan: always the same, with high kicks and hopes for smaller parties ending like the dance, doing ...

Nigel Farage

The Last Honest Man

I feel like Diogenes, the Ancient Greek who walked about sunny Athens with a lamp looking for an honest man. And I have found one in Nigel Farage, certainly the last politician who always tells the truth. What I find truly shocking is those who oppose him, the Rothermere press, for example, whose ...

The Good Guys Can’t Win

Speaking with a friend who is Jewish—arguing, rather—I reminded him that protesting against the death of innocents is hardly anti-Semitic. He agreed. And yet the death of 37,000 Palestinian noncombatants that have produced nonstop protests in Europe and in the United States are described as ...

Don’t Bet on It

Winning at all costs is a double-edged conundrum, especially where sport is concerned. Both my father and uncle were track stars who represented Greece during the Chariots of Fire period. Fair play back then was more important than winning. I was brought up that way, although it was hard to comply ...

A Liberal Dose of Nonsense

He’s physically repellent but writes quite elegantly, from the left, needless to say. He recently took a swipe at us dumb Christians for believing, he being Jewish and referring to our Lord Jesus as a crucified rabbi. Adam Gopnik is his name, and his reference to Jesus Christ was just a name-drop ...