Philosophy is a bit of a struggle for many of us, except, of course, if we’re professional footballers, pop stars, film actors, reality-TV performers, or hedge-fund managers. Although in last week’s Takimag I wrote about Nasser’s Egypt, I forgot to mention that the reason Nasser was so wildly ...
GSTAAD—Speaking in the House of Commons in 1940, Leo Amery rebuked Neville Chamberlain and his colleagues with the Oliver Cromwell quote, “In the name of God, go.” This was after the fall of France with England on the brink. Those telling Mubarak to go are on the street, not in parliament, ...
About fifteen years ago I received a very polite letter from Belgium asking me to list three of the most pompous and self-important people in the UK. It came with a self-addressed return envelope and stamp. The writer was known as l’entarteur, a man who would approach the pompous and vainglorious ...
Having spent a great part of my life charting the decline of civilization, I am not surprised at the goings-on in Tunisia, especially as I never considered the place to be civilized. How apt that the arch-crook dictator Ben Ali (Baba) slithered away to Saudi Arabia, itself a beacon of democracy and ...
GSTAAD—Back in 1975 Adam Ferguson, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, published a very important book with a very apt modern title, When Money Dies. It was about the Weimar hyperinflation nightmare, something our so-called leaders might well think about, which of course they will not. ...
GSTAAD—Six hours into the New Year, and already there was trouble. My own bash to welcome 2011 with fifty of my nearest and dearest finished around 5 a.m., so I rolled down toward the Palace hotel still looking for some action. I had a very pretty German girl in tow, my son’s friend Fiona, so I ...
OK. Let’s start the new year with a politically incorrect column by telling it like it is, for a change. During the last week of November, in Portland Oregon, the F.B.I. arrested a Somali born U.S. resident as he was about to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in a public square full of ...
NEW YORK—This is a bad time of year for atheists. So much so, they are showing signs of desperation. In the cesspool that is Uncle Sam’s capital, an unusual Christmas message began appearing last week on the sides of buses and trains: “NO GOD?…NO PROBLEM!” Two hundred and seventy of these ...
This is in praise of younger men. An outrage will take place at Preston Crown Court on January 7, 2011, when beautiful 27-year-old ballet teacher Sarah Pirie will be sentenced for an “improper relationship with a 15-year-old” who was not named (unlucky chappie) for obvious reasons. In my ...
The death of anyone well known - especially in New York - invokes more clichés than you know what draws flies in summer. Every obituary I read about Elaine included the words, "icon", "brassy", "landmark", "true New Yorker", and other such epithets. Let’s ...
