Tuesday last, April 12, one hundred and fifty years ago, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces fired the first shots on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The bombardment lasted 34 hours, and Fort Sumter occasionally replied with fire of its own. Then the white flag ...
Let's play the "What If?" game for a minute. What if I had written this column in October 2002 and some eagle-eyed aide to George W. Bush had noticed it and shown it to his moron boss? Had the moron read it and taken what I"m about to write into consideration, Uncle Sam might be one ...
NEW YORK—I went to see a revival of Arcadia in the beautiful Ethel Barrymore Theatre last Saturday night, and it made my day. Tom Stoppard is our greatest playwright, and I think Arcadia is his best play, although a couple of his other gems come close. I was with Marine Major Michael Warring and ...
This is the most outrageous proposal since Nero named his horse a senator. The suggestion that two of Gaddafi’s sons may inherit his mantle and a deal struck with the coalition is not even material for broken down comedians plying their trade in whore houses. Saif and his brothers have more ...
NEW YORK—They say when sexual attraction sets in, all other brain functions shut down. It’s nature’s way of ensuring procreation. My brain shut down last week, and for a Hollywood actress to boot. Of German extraction, Sandra Bullock is not the classic Aryan goddess, but she’s most ...
NEW YORK—Twenty-two years or so ago, I wrote a column for The New York Observer, a weekly paper owned by a tycoon named Arthur Carter. He had come up the hard way and made his fortune in Wall Street but retained his loathing for those who had made it the old-fashioned way, mainly by inheriting ...
GSTAAD—I’ve got the end-of-season blues. I know I say this every year, but this has been a particularly fun winter, with friends throwing goodbye parties, dinners, and lunches since the beginning of March. My liver has done a Gaddafi and taken a brutal revenge on my body. The right ankle is ...
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Up to London to collect my Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. My name is Dr. Taki from now on, and Jeremy Clarke can eat his heart out. If he’d stay out of pubs and do some research instead, he might one day get a Ph.D. like Dr. Gaddafi and Dr. Taki. Actually, my thesis was on the ...
GSTAAD—From my study’s wide-open, icicle-covered windows, one feels cocooned from the elements, as if in a prison cell but with the doors unlocked. The snows have finally come. The horizons are totally white. Clouds and snowy peaks intermingle in a rhapsody of snow-white, pine-green, and ...
Remember the old cliché about someone who is perpetually vacillating between a necktie and an open shirt? Or the one about the man who is noticeable for being completely unnoticeable? Step forward Ban Ki-moon, the useless UN's useless Secretary General. Despite persistent allegations that he is ...
