Desperately boring times, but very healthy ones. No parties, no girls, not too much boozing, lots of smoking and reading very late into the night. And nonstop training and sport. ...

No use datelining anymore, I’m here for the duration. Even the ski lifts have been ordered closed, chiuso, geschlossen, fermé. The only way to ski now is in the old-fashioned ...

GSTAAD—I was hoping to leave this virus-besieged village for the Bagel, especially after some jerk drove up from Milan and, not feeling his best, attended a party given by a ...

GSTAAD—I shoulda been a weatherman. No sooner had I announced snow to be a Gstaad rarity than it came down nonstop. Then it rained, so everything’s hunky-dory. Older rich ...

GSTAAD—It feels like a sepia-tinged melodrama, one directed by the great schlock-master Sam Wood. Driving up the winding valleys through the 17th-century villages and the Castle ...

I was not aware that there is a Spectator/Takimag fan club that meets in French-speaking Switzerland, and having contacted me we have agreed to meet this week up here in Gstaad. A ...

GSTAAD—Lenin Moreno is in trouble despite his very unchristian first name. For any of you unfamiliar with him, Señor Moreno is the president of Ecuador, a tiny South American ...

I find myself detached from mainstream culture. It started with the demise of nightclubs like Annabel’s, and the people that frequent them with names like Lil Nas X, Dua Lipa, ...

Did any of you know that most of the 20th-century monsters—Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Ceausescu, Duvalier, and even the Ethiopian mini-Napoleon Mengistu—were rather good writers who ...

GSTAAD—I’ve been hitting the books rather hard lately, the ritzy-glitzy crowd having gone the way of natural snow. There’s great skiing, they tell me, but it’s man-made ...

GSTAAD—The French have a saying: “Il n’y a rien de plus bête que le sourire du gagnant”; in other words, gloating is for dummies. Hence I won’t be doing it, despite the ...

By the time you read this it will all be over, but will it? I’ve had a bad feeling all along about those who opposed the result of the 2016 referendum. When they don’t get ...

How can I phrase it without sounding pompous? When very talented people dine together, it sometimes turns into a contest of wills and wits. Polite conversation, a French specialty ...

No use piling on where Prince Andrew is concerned. It’s not the end of the world, and he’s not among the brightest, either. Back in the summer of 2007, in Saint-Tropez, I had ...

NEW YORK—Things are heating up, in both London and Nueva York, as this place should correctly be called. Two flunkies writing in the N.Y. Times announced to the fools that read ...

At the time it felt like a century, but it was only twelve years. I began this column in 1977 and the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the latter calling for an end to my ...