High life
High life
New York New York, New York, once a wonderful town/ The people are crap and the mayor’s a clown/ The…
High life
Gstaad Juliette Gréco’s recent death in her nineties brought back some melodramatic memories. In 1957 Gréco was one of France’s…
High life
Gstaad It is not exactly a stop all the clocks occasion, let alone cut off the telephone, but I’ve finally…
High life
Gstaad I’ve been wrestling all week with indecision, the kind that tests one’s soul, and the uncertainty is killing me.…
High life
Gstaad I’m not usually nonplussed, but this is very strange: the memoir of Barbara Black, the wife of my…
High life
Gstaad It snowed on the last two days of August up here, and why not? We’ve traded freedom of speech…
High life
Gstaad I experienced my first Zoom conference last week, and didn’t think much of it. As the great Yogi Berra…
High life
Gstaad The jokes about keeping a mistress are old and I’ve yet to hear a truly funny one (‘The difference…
High life
Gstaad Birthdays at my age are for the birds, but always a good excuse for a party. Messages of…
High life
Serifos There’s no high life here, only family life, so I’ve been hitting the books about great Greeks of…
High life
Island of Serifos Let’s get one thing straight: island life is not for me. Island life off a boat, jawohl,…
High life
Athens This ancient city without tourists reminds me of the Athens I once knew and loved, but for the…
High life
The enforced boredom of lockdown has been replaced by a feeling of loss. My nephew by marriage, Hansie Schoenburg, died…
High life
Gstaad Are any of you tired of reading about Ghislaine Maxwell and her sleazy life? Bored by old news repeated…
High life
I just read a piece by Scott McConnell in the American Conservative, a magazine we co-founded 18 years ago. He…
High life
Gstaad A friend of mine who lives here wants to start a literary festival and asked me if I had…
High life
Gstaad I thought of Nietzsche while the mayhem and destruction of monuments was going on. Decadent bourgeois society was in…
High life
Oh, to be in America, where cultural decay and self-destruction compete equally with hyper-feminist and anti-racist agendas. Gone with the…
High life
Vienna Somebody once described Vienna as a top opera performed by understudies. The remark was unquestionably witty, but utterly false…
High life
Wolfsegg, Austria I have finally understood what’s wrong with the modern world: motorways. These dehumanising slabs of asphalt covering our…
High life
Gstaad Well, Theodora did not wait and I missed yet another grandchild’s birth (the prettiest little blue-eyed thing ever, even…
High life
Gstaad The staff are back and all is well, as they used to say long ago in faraway places. The…
High life
Gstaad Hippocrates is known as the father of Western medicine and he discovered and named a disease known as ‘micropoulaki’…
High life
Gstaad Let me begin with a salute to the winner of this year’s Sir Jimmy Goldsmith prize: Professor Neil Ferguson.…
High life
Gstaad When indolence becomes intolerable, remembrances of things past become a lifesaver. Charles Moore’s SpectatorNotes also helps. His recent…
