When A Moveable Feast was published in 1964, I had been living in Paris for six years. I was 27 and in love with Papa Hemingway’s favorite city, one that he described as “a mistress who always has new lovers.” One didn’t speak this way back then, but the book really blew my mind. Totally. ...
NEW YORK-They found this place 400 years ago this year among the Indians in the marches, and no one’s looked back since. Some of the Dutch descendants are still around but you wouldn’t know it by reading the gossip columns or celebrity blogs. This is immigrant paradise, and the less ...
He is the clown prince in a continent whose rulers boast of more clowns among them than all the circuses of the world combined. He uses more black shoe polish on his hair than a company of Rumanian hussars use on their thigh-high boots, and plasters more makeup on his face than Norma Desmond. He ...
NEW YORK–Cement barriers, stanchions, cop cars, motorcycles, black SUV’s, flashing lights, bullhorn warnings to move to the side or else, mean-looking dudes in dark suits, dark glasses and talking into their cufflinks, a hobbit named Sarkozy jogging in Central Park to the exclusion of the rest ...
New York—Irving Kristol who died last week was generally seen as the father of neoconservatism, a non-existent concept in Europe where we’re steeped into more traditional and less opportunistic politics. I once sat with him at a dinner in honour of William Buckley given by Drue Heintz ...
There is a mordant Eskimo proverb that says a good butler is worth at least three wives. The only trouble being I’ve never heard of an Eskimo with a butler. Gianni Agnelli had two he couldn’t do without: Pasquale, until he reached 40, and then Bruno, until the “avvocato’s” death. ...
GSTAAD—From my desk facing the garden I look out on a vista of wooded green hills with an unblemished blue background. Far beyond, the mountains are grey and white-capped on top. The sun is blazing, the cows are grazing, and I have to leave this paradise for karate and judo training in the ...
A modern ritual which annoys me rather a lot is that of having to see Billie Jean King’s bloated face and dyed hair during opening and closing Grand Slam tennis ceremonies. King was a hell of a player, but much too loud and brash for her time, which was my time as well, incidentally. Little ...
GSTAAD: What I find quite fascinating is how Americans have a blind spot about their own flaws in the area of human rights, and how they feel they have a duty to lecture other countries on the issue. I am, of course, referring to the outrage over the Libyan deal, an outrage shared by most people ...
GSTAAD—Gee whizz, couldn’t someone have told me about it 19 years ago? Did I have to read it in Toby Young’s column? Someone should be held responsible, but who? It was only two weeks ago that I discovered that there is a scale of recognition in British public life—“an unofficial ...
