I was busy explaining why the election was not a disaster to a 23-year-old American girl by the name of Jennifer. She is a Spectator reader and wants to work in England, preferably in politics. She called the results the worst news since her father abandoned her mother. I begged to differ. ...

Main Street is a place, but it’s mostly an idea. It’s locally owned shops selling stuff to hardworking townies, as we used to call the locals back when I was in boarding school. The townies worked dependable blue-collar jobs in auto plants and coal mines. Their sons played American football ...

I feel like an obituary writer, what with Nick Scott, Roger Moore, Alistair Horne—all great buddies—having recently passed away, and now my oldest and closest friend, Aleko Goulandris, dead at 90. Mind you, they all had very good lives: plenty of women, lots of fun, accomplishments galore, and ...

Although both guilt and innocence fascinate me, I’m not so sure there is such a thing as redemption. I know, it sounds very unchristian, but there you have it. For me, bad guys remain bad, and good guys ditto. In the meantime, I didn’t make it to Rupert Deen’s memorial service, nor that of my ...

The dinner party at an old friend’s house was as chic as it gets. Then a Trump insider asked, “Who is the American president who had an affair with a French president’s wife?” It was an easy one. And it’s been out there for years: The Donald has claimed he did Carla long before she got ...

Much like the poor, the charity ball has always been with us, but lately it’s turned into a freak show. Something is rotten in the state of New York, and the name of it is the Met Gala. Once upon a time, the Metropolitan Museum’s gala ball was fun. Serious social-climbing multimillionaires ...

I’m sitting in my office room and the place is still. The rest of the house is dark. Everyone’s out and I’m here writing about the death of a friend. I haven’t felt such gloom since my father died 28 years ago. The question of Why did he have to die? is implicitly followed by that of How ...

Twenty-five years ago this week, Los Angeles was burning because of Rodney King’s beating by the fuzz and I had my shoulder sliced open by a doctor in order to repair torn ligaments. My shoulder hurt more than Rodney’s ribs, because I saw him on TV get up and gesticulate freely after being ...

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 ...