High life
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…
Writing my High Life column made a man of me
As Cole Porter might have said, only second-rate people go on and on about their inner lives. Self-analysis, according to…
The joy of pumping iron at 83
Gstaad So the days — and months — drift by. This once peaceful Alpine town is packed with rich refugees…
The way Greece has conducted itself in this pandemic is an example to us all
Aristophanes was a comic genius long before the Marx Brothers, but he also gave good advice to the Athenians: stop…
Covid-19 shows us that virtue trumps freedom
Look at it this way: we’re all doing Desert Island Discs nowadays, and unless you’ve got the bug, it’s a…
How tennis went socialist
Desperately boring times but very healthy ones. No parties, no girls, not too much boozing, lots of smoking and reading…
The joys of social isolation
No use datelining any more, I’m here for the duration. Even the ski lifts have been ordered to close: chiuso,…
America has turned into a bad joke
Gstaad Rumours about the virus are flying around this village. First there was talk of a hotel being temporarily…
A meditation on death
Gstaad I shoulda been a weatherman: no sooner had I announced snow to be a Gstaad rarity than it…
Why Spectator readers are the nicest people
Gstaad It feels like a sepia-tinged melodrama, one directed by the great schlock master Sam Wood. Driving along the winding…
Why Bloomberg will be president
Gstaad I was not aware that there is a group of Spectatorfans who meet in French-speaking Switzerland. They contacted me…
The appeal of ugly men
Gstaad Lenin Moreno is in trouble, despite his very unchristian first name. For any of you unfamiliar with the name,…
The golden age of nightclubs
I find myself detached from mainstream culture. It started with the demise of nightclubs like Annabel’s and the arrival of…
My fellow dinner guests made me feel like a combination of Messalina and Lady Macbeth
I was walking up St James’s and happy to be in London. For a change I was not rushing but…
Why do monsters make such good writers?
Did any of you know that most of the 20th-century monsters — Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Ceausescu, Duvalier, and even the…
Two books that made me forget everything else
Gstaad I’ve been hitting the books rather hard lately, the ritzy-glitzy crowd having gone the way of natural snow. There’s…
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