Taki

Taki Theodoracopulos has written The Spectator's High Life column since 1977.

I’m now considered a freak in New York

24 October 2020 9:00 am

New York It’s nice to finally be in the Bagel, a place where the cows have two legs and no…

New York is a paradise for criminals

17 October 2020 9:00 am

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

10 October 2020 9:00 am

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

3 October 2020 9:00 am

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

26 September 2020 9:00 am

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

19 September 2020 9:00 am

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

12 September 2020 9:00 am

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

5 September 2020 9:00 am

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

29 August 2020 9:00 am

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

22 August 2020 9:00 am

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

15 August 2020 9:00 am

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

8 August 2020 9:00 am

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

1 August 2020 9:00 am

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

25 July 2020 9:00 am

The enforced boredom of lockdown has been replaced by a feeling of loss.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

18 July 2020 9:00 am

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

11 July 2020 9:00 am

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

4 July 2020 9:00 am

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

27 June 2020 9:00 am

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

20 June 2020 9:00 am

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

13 June 2020 9:00 am

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

6 June 2020 9:00 am

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

30 May 2020 9:00 am

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

23 May 2020 9:00 am

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

16 May 2020 9:00 am

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

9 May 2020 9:00 am

Gstaad Let me begin with a salute to the winner of this year’s Sir Jimmy Goldsmith prize: Professor Neil Ferguson.…