Nixon was demonised by the press from day one. He was ill at ease in public, and did not possess the Kennedy blarney which so endeared that flawed Irish clan to the chattering classes. He was not cool, as my son would say, but so what? ...

The real reason for American rage against Iran is the knowledge that the Shiites have made complete fools of them. Shiite exiles like the conman Ahmad Chalabi not only took Yankee gold, but sold them snake oil no five-year-old would ...

Andy Warhol was a unique American phenomenon. When his infamous diaries came out - the first best-seller purposely without an index, so fame groupies could not read about themselves in the bookstore and then not buy the opus - I was ...

Prizes and awards depend on whims of insiders, nothing more, nothing less. Certain themes are sacrosanct, such as disabilities. Hence Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot and Geoffrey Rush in Shine. The Academy also has intellectual ...

When an Italian finishes making love he looks at the mirror, flexes his muscles and tells himself, Magnifico! When a Frenchman is through, he tells the lady that she may have captured his body but not his soul. When an Englishman ...

Poetry is in trouble. It is garbage being written by modernists—stuff that doesn’t rhyme and makes no sense but is considered art. Let’s stick to the past. Dante, the all time numero uno, Homer, Pushkin, Keats, Byron, Coleridge, ...

The United States has no right to use nuclear weapons except in response to a nuclear attack. Nuking a nation that does not possess them, and has not attacked us, is in fact a war crime—the kind of crime for which we rightly hanged ...

Courchevel, the French Riviera, even St Moritz have been Dresdened by the Russians, their obnoxious spending and lack of basic manners amounting to a grotesque deformity. Here in Gstaad we live in fear of the coming oligarch ...

Owning a boat, especially a sailing yacht, is like having a beautiful mistress with your wife's approval. This is the good news. The bad is that a boat is even more expensive than a high class ...

The Boston Globe praises Saudi Arabia and its rulers for its diplomatic finesse in brokering a cease-fire between Hamas and Fatah. This is the way it should be. When someone finally does something good, they should be praised. Up to a ...

Oh, to be in England! The once upon a time green and pleasant land is now Europe’s burglary capital, the most violent country in the old continent, Albania included. It’s gotten so bad that the paralyzed Blair government has ...

A London friend has sent me a book whose subject caused a few faint complaints in the beginning but has now escalated to a full-scale furore, Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Racist and anti-Semitic have been the ...