Donna Karan

Hypocritical Oaths

The only woman who has not been sexually harassed and possibly raped by Harvey Weinstein is Mata Hari, and that’s because she was executed by the brave French a hundred years ago this month for spying. She was not a German spy and she blew kisses to the firing squad that shot her full of holes. ...

Bernie Sanders

The Mystery of Socialism’s Enduring Appeal

This is very strange. I left the old continent a disunited mess, with African immigrants overrunning the place and an unelected and unaccountable bureaucratic elite using the media to inform the peasants that everything is hunky-dory. I arrived in the good old US of A and was informed by the media ...

Harvey Weinstein and Georgina Chapman

Let’s Talk About Harvey

I smell a rat when it comes to Harvey Weinstein. Let’s take it from the start. The telephone rang very early in the morning and a woman’s voice told me that Harvey Weinstein wanted to speak to me. I was put on hold and I waited. And waited, and then waited some more. The reason I didn’t hang ...

C.Z. Guest

Gigolo Journal

The death of the richest woman on the planet, as the tabloids dubbed Liliane Bettencourt, brought back some vivid memories, mainly of the gigolos I’ve known and their disgraceful pursuit of the fairer sex for the root of all envy. Ironically, my great friend Porfirio Rubirosa acted the gigolo at ...

Jeff Bezos

Sins of Silicon Valley

Instead of getting life without parole in one of those white isolation cells in the toughest of jails for aiding and abetting terrorism, he is feted the world over and is America’s third-richest man, after Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Step forward, Jeff Bezos, third-richest with 87 billion big ...

Yvette Cooper

Forty Winks

I think this week marks my fortieth anniversary as a Spectator columnist, but I’m not 100 percent certain. All I know is that I was 39 or 40 years old when the column began, and that I’ve just had my 81st birthday. Keeping a record is not my strong point, and it’s also a double-edged knife. I ...

Bob Geldof

The Fondest of Farewells

As everyone who stands up when a lady enters the room knows, the once-sacrosanct civil rules throughout the West have all but disappeared. The deterioration of manners has accelerated with the coming of the devil’s device—the dehumanizing iPhone—and with phony “art” and artists such as ...

Grand Canal, Venice

Death of Venice

I’m in Venice for the film festival that just ended, and as an American humorist once wired his paper, “Streets full of water, stop. Send funds, stop.” What is there to say about Venice that hasn’t already been said or written by better men or women? (Thomas Mann and Jan Morris come to ...

Sanaa, Yemen

Saudi Thugs and Book Plugs

After the heat in Greece, the Alps are cool and green and very comfortable. My sensei Richard Amos is over here, and we squeezed two weeks of intensive karate training into three days. Nothing makes me feel better than the sense of total exhaustion after a hard day’s fight. We do “kihon” and ...

Princess Diana

Live and Let Di

I was appalled. She had asked Lord John Somerset to ask me to join her, and I rose rather unsteadily to do so. This was during a Jimmy Goldsmith ball, and I was writing the Atticus column in The Sunday Times, along with High Life in The Spectator. A German girlfriend of mine at the time warned me ...