Remembering Oleg Cassini

Gstaad. An article in Vanity Fair about a man I knew for over forty years has turned me into Orlando Furioso. Oleg Cassini died in 2006 well into his nineties.  We met in 1956 on an airplane going to Bermuda to play a tennis tournament. Cassini was a good club player and a so-so skier, back in ...

Shimon Peres Can Say What He Will, But Brits Love Jews

On board S/Y Bushido. Sailing down the eastern coast of the Peloponnese I thought I spotted some anti-Semites adrift, but they turned out to be Norwegians, flying a British flag. Although becalmed they needed nothing but a breeze, so we wished them good day and motored off. Ever since Shimon Peres ...

Cultural Pessimism on the High Seas

On board s/y Bushido. “ Trimming the Jib”  is a short story by Ernest Hemingway and it has to do with the sea. And love. And passion. He wrote it shortly before “The Old Man and the Sea,” which helped land him the Nobel Prize for literature. Here it is in its entirety: “He ran aground ...

It’s All Greek to Me

Athens. As everyone knows, Sigmund Freud was a fraud, and like many frauds he thought the Parthenon might also be one. But he summoned his nerve and visited the sacred sight and was delighted as well as shocked at what he saw. This was 1904. Like other visitors Freud dreaded that the real thing ...

To Johnny Mercer, A True Romantic

Which evokes a romantic memory better, a fragrance or a melody? The latter, I am sure, despite the times I’ve felt a tug at my heart when some sweet young thing breezed by me followed by the aroma of Chanel no 5, the favorite scent of my first great love back in the fifties. Music and lyrics are ...

The Centre for Social Justice and Reverberations from The Spectator Garden Party

My last week in London felt like end of school term, bittersweet. I was glad to be flying off to the sun, but sad to leave good friends and very good times behind. Mind you, the last night following the Speccie summer party descended into farce when my Low Life colleague and I were photographed at ...

Letter from Mykonos

Mykonos. Lying northward of the sacred island of Delos, Mykonos is as profane as it gets. Largely barren, it used to be a brothel during ancient times, or so Herodotus tells us, and it continues its erotic, carnal ways as the mecca of gay and lesbian love. Sir Elton and lady John were just here, ...

Europes ‘National’ Identity

My last week in London and it is just as well. One more would most likely kill me. The least frantic night was the one that Simon Phillips and Roger Moore threw in Harry’s Bar for Unicef, as worthy a charity as there is, following “Masterpiece” at the former Chelsea Barracks. I sat ...

Of Drunken Ascot and Cricket Orgies

During my book party one month ago—rather surprisingly, the thing is selling well—I spotted Ferdinand Mount in the crowd and asked him to meet a friend of mine. Ferdie recognized the name immediately. “You brought cheer to the plains of India,” he told Naresh Kumar, quoting ...

The World’s Longest Con

Is there anything worse than listening to those hucksters in South Africa going bananas over the ugly game called football? Modern society is dominated by emotion and propaganda, not to mention profit, and when all three are combined what we get is the World Cup. Technicolor pictures of fat men and ...