ATHENS—This ancient city without tourists reminds me of the Athens I once knew and loved, but for the hideous ’60s modern buildings that defaced its beauty like plastic ...

The lockdown and its enforced boredom have been replaced by a consistent feeling of loss, my nephew by marriage Hansie Schoenburg, age 33, from a brain tumor, and my close friend ...

GSTAAD—Are any of you tired of reading about Ghislaine Maxwell and her sleazy life? Bored with old news repeated ad nauseam by people who never had—and still don’t have—a ...

Apple pie, farms, local movie theaters, pickup baseball games, swimming holes, volunteer firemen, and small libraries with very old lady librarians: an America soon to be gone ...

GSTAAD—A friend of mine who lives here wants to start a literary festival and asked me if I had some advice for him. He’s a nice fellow and very friendly with my daughter, but ...

GSTAAD—I thought of Nietzsche while the mayhem and destruction of monuments were going on, and his dictum of strengthening the strong and paralyzing the weak as a means of ...

GSTAAD—Oh, to be in America, where cultural decay and self-destruction compete equally with hyperfeminist and anti-racist agendas. Gone With the Wind is suddenly as popular as ...

VIENNA—Somebody once described Vienna as a top opera performed by understudies. The remark was unquestionably witty, but utterly false back when it was made. It is perfectly ...

AUSTRIA—I finally understand what’s wrong with the modern world: motorways! These dehumanizing slabs of asphalt lining our continents are Prometheus-like chains luring us to ...

GSTAAD—Well, Theodora did not wait and I missed yet another grandchild’s birth. (The prettiest little blue-eyed thing ever, if I say so myself.) Funny thing is, I’ve never ...

GSTAAD—The staff is back and all is well, as they used to say long ago in faraway places. The gardener and the cleaner are Portuguese, and they greet me with their inherent ...

GSTAAD—Hippocrates is known as the father of Western medicine, and he diagnosed and named the disease “micropoulaki” during the Periclean period, around 430 BC. He did not ...

GSTAAD—Two years or so ago I had back-to-back New York luncheons with Steve Bannon, and boy, did some of his predictions and fears ever come true! Bannon’s White House days as ...

So the days dwindle down, September, November... This once-peaceful alpine town is packed with rich refugees fleeing the you-know-what from nearby cities crammed with real ...

Aristophanes was a comic genius before the Marx Brothers, but he also gave good advice to the Athenians: Stop the war! In his play Lysistrata he had the women going on strike—no ...

Look at it this way, we’re all doing Desert Island Discs nowadays, and unless you got the bug, it’s a damn good thing, too. I did the Desert Island bit around thirty years ...