High life

Why Simone de Beauvoir is my kind of woman

19 October 2019 9:00 am

New York   A strange thing happened to me here in the Bagel last week. Having read the recent review…

Why Roy Cohn is not one of the world’s most evil men

12 October 2019 9:00 am

New York   The Roy Cohn documentary Bully. Coward. Victim: the Story of Roy Cohn was successfully screened at the…

What you can tell about a man from his choice of underwear

5 October 2019 9:00 am

New York It’s Indian summertime and the living is easy. There hasn’t been a cloud above the Bagel for two…

An elegy for New York

28 September 2019 9:00 am

New York The master of the love letter to New York, E.B. White, eloquently described the city as a place…

[Photo: by-studio]

Why I prefer cows to humans

21 September 2019 9:00 am

Gstaad   The cows are coming down, the cows are coming down, and I’m off to the Bagel. My Swiss…

Remembering Tim Hoare – a man like no other

14 September 2019 9:00 am

He was a Falstaff in his drinking and in his celebration of life, but his greatness lay in his friendships.…

My soulmate Brian Sewell

7 September 2019 9:00 am

Romy Somerset is the sweetest, nicest young girl in London. She’s also my goddaughter and I remember, during her christening…

How to be a man

31 August 2019 9:00 am

Gstaad   I was reading in these here pages Julie Burchill’s review of Candace Bushnell’s Is There Still Sex in…

My jailhouse diet

24 August 2019 9:00 am

Gstaad   It’s written in the Declaration of Independence, so it must be true: the pursuit of happiness is an…

The only time I was ever spiked was when I called Jeffrey Epstein a raging paedophile

Another birthday has got me down, but the alternative is being dead

17 August 2019 9:00 am

If it hadn’t arrived I’d be dead, but it was hardly welcome: another birthday — 38 years old on 11…

Credit: scaliger

Standing on the Acropolis brings out the Greek in me

10 August 2019 9:00 am

Athens I am struggling up the slippery marble steps of the Acropolis with the Geldofs and the Bismarcks. We gaze…

Words of wisdom, and plenty of them, from the Irishman who saved Africa

Chatting to Bob Geldof about Boris and Brexit

3 August 2019 9:00 am

Coronis   We are steaming on Puritan towards the private isle of Coronis for a long Pugs weekend and the…

Greece’s new Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis promises higher growth and lower taxes [Getty]

No ‘cool’ people here: the joys of Serifos

27 July 2019 9:00 am

Serifos He went away to fight and the war lasted ten years. He missed his wife but he didn’t worry…

Let’s choose our politicians by random selection

20 July 2019 9:00 am

Athens Standing right below the Acropolis, where pure democracy began because public officials were elected by lot, I try to…

Coco Gauff won fair and square, but she played terrible tennis

13 July 2019 9:00 am

Martina Navratilova has never been shy about telling it like it is. She came out when other athletes were hiding…

Credit: drante

The death of free thought

6 July 2019 9:00 am

Hold the presses, this is a world exclusive. A Boris ex I sat next to last week gave me the…

Nice men make terrible leaders

29 June 2019 9:00 am

The Duke of Marlborough gave a toast last week that brought the house down during a Turning Point dinner for…

After the week I’ve just had will my liver ever recover?

22 June 2019 9:00 am

Bellamy’s and Oswald’s are the two best restaurants in London. They are owned by two friends of mine — both…

Boris is the only one who can save the Tories

15 June 2019 9:00 am

A lady once offered to go to bed with me if I could ensure that she would write The Spectator’s…

The joy of my grandson’s baptism

8 June 2019 9:00 am

They were putting the finishing touches to the giant tent as I drove up to Schloss Wolfsegg after an hour’s…

The softer side of Hemingway

1 June 2019 9:00 am

I didn’t like it, and then I did like it. But a writer’s job is to tell the truth, as…

My feud with Conrad Black

25 May 2019 9:00 am

Goody goody gumdrops! The Donald has pardoned Lord Black and I couldn’t be happier. Conrad got a bum deal and…

The death of New York’s nightlife

18 May 2019 9:00 am

New York   This is my last week in the Bagel and I’m going to give it the old college…

A lament for the UK and the US

11 May 2019 9:00 am

New York   Here’s a question for you: if your wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, toy boy even, lied repeatedly to…

Sebastian Flyte had nothing on me: memories of a misspent youth

4 May 2019 9:00 am

Charlottesville is an enchanting Virginia college town graced by the neoclassical architecture of the university’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. I flew…