High life
For the first time in my life I felt like a rock star
Ah, spring! The spring of our frostbitten age. At the Polish Club in London, a wonderful place studded with portraits…
High life
Ah, spring! The spring of our frostbitten age. At the Polish Club in London, a wonderful place studded with portraits…
Even a perfect opera such as Don Giovanni improves with a good red
End of season is always bittersweet, the melting snows a bit like autumn leaves. But the days are longer and…
High life
End of season is always bittersweet, the melting snows a bit like autumn leaves. But the days are longer and…
Make no mistake: the Top Gear brouhaha is cultural warfare
It’s a famous quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one that Elton John should ponder (when he’s not out shopping, that…
No man ever wanted a dumb broad for a wife
As I was flipping through some television garbage trying to induce sleep, I came upon an old western starring Kirk…
Where Alcibiades once walked, amateur tax spies are trying to entrap poor pistachio-sellers
Athens I am walking on a wide pedestrian road beneath the Acropolis within 200 meters of the remaining Themistoclean wall…
Old age is not for sissies
The secret of eternal youth, according to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, is arrested development, and the penny dropped last week. The…
Once upon a time I was very proud to be Greek. But no more
Gstaad A naked, very good-looking young man skied down the mountain evoking shrieks of laughter and admiration from the hundred…
The future was looking bleak for a poor little Greek Boy who had turned 30, but then I met Arnaud de Borchgrave
I hate to start with a cliché, but Count Arnaud de Borchgrave d’Altena, who died in Washington DC last week,…
At 78 years of age, I can’t keep up with the young shuss-boomers any longer
Gstaad Once upon a time clergymen saw mountain peaks as natural steeples leading them ever closer to God. Doctors considered…
Taki’s recipe for the survival of the Greek nation
The good news is that a Greek suppository is about to relieve the EU’s economic constipation. The bad is that…
Those ancient Greeks were bores — but things are looking up
Thick snow is falling hard and heavy, muffling sounds and turning the picturesque village postcard beautiful. I am lying in…
My four great loves were unrequited (though I had a chance with Ginger Rogers)
I had a short chat with BBC radio concerning the actor Jack Nicholson, whom I knew slightly during the Seventies…
Let’s all become Japanese for a while
This is a good time to write about a nation’s resilience in the face of calamity. I am referring to…
The missed New Year opportunities I would have rowed the Atlantic for
Gstaad The very end of 2014 laid an egg, and an expensive one at that. I missed David Tang’s bash…
Warning: these books could seriously damage your health
Welcome to 2015, the year that speaking and writing freely had to stop. Anything that might cause trauma to anyone…
Taki's Christmas gift to readers: a masterclass in the art of seduction
Here is my Christmas gift to Spectator readers, one that applies mostly to unmarried males, but is also available to…
Another New York institution bites the dust
Except for sickness in one’s family or the loss of a life, is there anything sadder than to see a…
Once upon a time, when a poor farmer came to the big city he put on his only suit
The leaves are falling non-stop, like names dropped in Hollywood, and it has suddenly turned colder than the look I…
Snobbery, sneering and secret sniggers: the sad truth about the so-called 'special relationship'
To the grand Herrera house on the upper east side of Manhattan for lunch in honour of Lord and Lady…
Unlike the philistine sharks of today, Aleko Goulandris is an art collector of the old school
Aleko Goulandris is my oldest and closest friend. We met in the summer of 1945, at the Semiramis hotel in…
The difficult art of finding the right yacht
To Newport, Rhode Island, the smallest state in the Union but one of the most beautiful. Driving north-east from the…
The beauty of fire escapes and the vanishing of Edward Hopper's New York
Autumn in New York: they even wrote a song about it that was a great hit 60 years ago. Last…
My fury at Fury, a film only a vampire could love
I have always believed that the mission of most movies made after the Fred & Ginger era has been to…
