High life
New York is a paradise for criminals
New York New York, New York, once a wonderful town/ The people are crap and the mayor’s a clown/ The…
My nights of passion with Juliette Gréco
Gstaad Juliette Gréco’s recent death in her nineties brought back some melodramatic memories. In 1957 Gréco was one of France’s…
Why I’m moving to England
Gstaad It is not exactly a stop all the clocks occasion, let alone cut off the telephone, but I’ve finally…
What I would do if I were in charge of the BBC
Gstaad I’ve been wrestling all week with indecision, the kind that tests one’s soul, and the uncertainty is killing me.…
What Barbara Black’s choice of friends says about her
Gstaad I’m not usually nonplussed, but this is very strange: the memoir of Barbara Black, the wife of my…
Trump should take lessons in lying from Joe Biden
Gstaad It snowed on the last two days of August up here, and why not? We’ve traded freedom of speech…
Bob Geldof is an unconventional Zoom host
Gstaad I experienced my first Zoom conference last week, and didn’t think much of it. As the great Yogi Berra…
The art of being a mistress
Gstaad The jokes about keeping a mistress are old and I’ve yet to hear a truly funny one (‘The difference…
How to have a happy old age
Gstaad Birthdays at my age are for the birds, but always a good excuse for a party. Messages of…
How to fight a good war
Serifos There’s no high life here, only family life, so I’ve been hitting the books about great Greeks of…
Island life is not for me
Island of Serifos Let’s get one thing straight: island life is not for me. Island life off a boat, jawohl,…
I love Greece and the Greeks but they have destroyed Athens
Athens This ancient city without tourists reminds me of the Athens I once knew and loved, but for the…
In memory of the man who never slept
The enforced boredom of lockdown has been replaced by a feeling of loss. My nephew by marriage, Hansie Schoenburg, died…
My advice to Johnny Depp
Gstaad Are any of you tired of reading about Ghislaine Maxwell and her sleazy life? Bored by old news repeated…
The forgotten victims of communism
I just read a piece by Scott McConnell in the American Conservative, a magazine we co-founded 18 years ago. He…
How not to run a literary festival
Gstaad A friend of mine who lives here wants to start a literary festival and asked me if I had…
The mob mentality of the elite
Gstaad I thought of Nietzsche while the mayhem and destruction of monuments was going on. Decadent bourgeois society was in…
The death of free speech
Oh, to be in America, where cultural decay and self-destruction compete equally with hyper-feminist and anti-racist agendas. Gone with the…
An elegy for Vienna
Vienna Somebody once described Vienna as a top opera performed by understudies. The remark was unquestionably witty, but utterly false…
I went to hell and back to meet my new granddaughter
Wolfsegg, Austria I have finally understood what’s wrong with the modern world: motorways. These dehumanising slabs of asphalt covering our…
I’ve made up for missing all my children’s and grandchildren’s births
Gstaad Well, Theodora did not wait and I missed yet another grandchild’s birth (the prettiest little blue-eyed thing ever, even…
Switzerland is now an enemy of the rich
Gstaad The staff are back and all is well, as they used to say long ago in faraway places. The…
Envy is the greatest blight of all
Gstaad Hippocrates is known as the father of Western medicine and he discovered and named a disease known as ‘micropoulaki’…
I salute Professor Neil Ferguson
Gstaad Let me begin with a salute to the winner of this year’s Sir Jimmy Goldsmith prize: Professor Neil Ferguson.…
The night I danced with Ginger Rogers
Gstaad When indolence becomes intolerable, remembrances of things past become a lifesaver. Charles Moore’s SpectatorNotes also helps. His recent…
