Solitude can offer a blissful disengagement from the horrors of modern-day life, even if it’s forced upon us by a government lockdown. Enforced solitude could even be a spiritual blessing, but for the escapism of television, that medium of absolute rubbish, vulgarity, and violence that Hollywood calls entertainment. As long as we avoid sabotaging diversions, we...
It is a universally acknowledged truth that when epidemics strike, men and women turn to God. In this latest of epidemics, most churches the world over have been closed and their worshippers have been directed to websites where leaders hold virtual ceremonies. There have been reports of crackdowns on Christians attempting to worship in the...
As everyone who has not been in total coronavirus quarantine knows, Harvey Weinstein was recently condemned to death for sexually assaulting six Hollywood wannabes. Actually, he was given 23 years in prison, but in view of his 67 years of age, it would have been far more dramatic and fitting for the former Hollywood film...
I never thought I’d get back to this silly subject for Chronicles ever again, but the Markles—as I now refer to them—have a way of getting our attention, and embarrassing Al Capone in the process. As the Feds were closing in on him, Al was told Chicago was getting too hot and he should move...
Global warming is still a “maybe,” but in the Swiss Alps the visual evidence is undeniable. The glacier I used to ski on has disappeared, and man-made snow is pumped out daily in its place. The once-small alpine village from where I write this column is now a Mecca of the nouveaux riche and vulgar—snow...
I began my journalistic career under strict censorship. It was imposed on the press and media by the Greek colonels who had seized power in a bloodless coup in Athens on April 21, 1967. Censorship, however, suited me fine. That’s because I was an ardent backer of the coup, the democratic process having been torn...
The following was recently but ecstatically pronounced by the malignant, anti-white, anti-Christian, and anti-male New York Times: “Perhaps for the first time since the United States was established, a majority of young adults here do not identify as Christian.” Yes, you read it right: the Sulzberger gang that owns the paper celebrates this sorry state...
The Republic is in crisis. America’s intellectual class is working to discredit our past. The media is waging war against the middle-class values of hard work, religion, and family. In order not to be outdone, Hollywood’s message is more violence, vulgarity, and unbridled hedonism. So, as the ship is starting to list, why would I...
Ten years or so ago Stephen Fry, English polymath, writer, TV personality, stage and screen actor, and many other things, gave a Spectator-sponsored lecture at the prestigious Royal Geographical Society. His theme was appreciation for America, where he said he would choose to live “in a heartbeat.” I know Stephen and paid extra attention to...
Sailing in Homer’s wine-dark Aegean Sea, and traipsing all over the Acropolis and the marvels of antiquity, is the best antidote I know to the brouhaha over “The Squad.” It makes these four publicity-seeking, opportunistic mental dwarfs seem even pettier than they are. Mind you, these petulant females wouldn’t know the difference between Corinthian and...
A wise man recently said: Our youth love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for their elders, and no longer rise when a lady enters the room. They chatter instead of exercising, gobble up their food, and tyrannize their teachers. That was Socrates, 2000 years ago, which I suppose qualifies...
Some years ago my friend and neighbor Baron Philip Lambert had my wife and me to dinner in his chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland, and the talk turned to Belgian history. Philip’s grandfather, a banker, had lent money to King Leopold II of Belgium to buy real estate in Africa. He bought the Congo. Then paid...
“Woke” is the concept that everything must be inclusive and inoffensive. Oh dear! Being hyperaware of everyone’s sensitivities makes one a hell of a bore. I recently flew down to Charlottesville, Virginia, where I had gone to university, to speak at a memorial service for my friend Willy von Raab. The other speaker was P.J....
OK, sport fans, get your wallets out and start giving. That’s the latest brainstorm from a New York Times columnist who makes an unconvincing case for reparations to black people. For slavery, that is. And that means you, whitey, or brownie, and I guess that goes for yellow ones also. He wants these reparations to...
Hold the presses! More Germans trust Vladimir Putin’s Russia than Trump’s United States. This is earth-shattering news, a scoop like no other. If this were 1969, the moon landing would be a smaller headline. And who came up with the scoop? None other than the New York Times, the paper that first told us that...
Everyone’s rather angry nowadays. Women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, college students, college professors, Hollywood stars, Democratic politicians—you name them, they’re upset. The Donald seems finally to have united the United States. Everybody hates Trump and, of course, men. Toxic masculinity has replaced the evil Nazis and their goose-step, and Trump the loathsome...
Let’s begin 2019 with some truths and a few admissions: We humans have been evolving for some time now, but not really. Only a few decades ago we were certain that the oldest human fossil was a small-brained female by the name of Lucy. Lucy was a species known as Australopithecus afarensis, which existed from...
A fifth columnist is a supporter or secret sympathizer of an enemy nation, and the phrase was coined by Spanish nationalist general Emilio Mola. Before World War II broke out in 1939, Europe was awash with references to “The Fifth Column at work,” and the phrase was bandied about by both appeasers and those who...
The suppression of manners and the power of the halfwit elite Sometime during the 1920’s, at an exclusive party at Count Boni de Castellane’s, a great French lady felt herself beginning to die at the dinner table. “Quick, bring the dessert,” she whispered to the waiter. She was not overcome by greed. She simply wished...
Some of you oldsters will never believe this, but London is no longer the place where The Blue Lamp and other black-and-white golden oldies were made. During the postwar years, with rationing still on and the empire unraveling, England made some of the best movies ever. They were intelligently scripted, underplayed, and beautifully acted by...
Here’s a question for you: Could the “monster” of the #MeToo movement get a fair trial anywhere in these United States? Is there a potential jury member that has not made up his mind that Harvey Weinstein raped, mistreated, and oppressed women? Since last October to be exact, every news organization in America has been...
August is the time for cruising. Once upon a time, cruising the Med was fun, especially around the French Riviera. Now the sea is full of garbage, the ports packed with horror megayachts owned by horrid Arabs and eastern oligarch gangsters, while most Italian, Spanish, and French resorts are overrun by sweaty tourists covered in...
I recently had a spirited discussion with the British historian James Holland, brother of Tom Holland, also a distinguished man of letters, about FDR, his oil embargo of Japan, and the root causes of World War II. We were in Normandy, inspecting the battle scenes of D-day, with James giving us the kind of briefings...
Bonjour, mes amis! Fifty years ago this month, I was living in Paris, and life was, shall we say, grand. Back then there was nothing like Paris in the spring and early summer, with formal balls galore, polo in the Bois de Boulogne, and late-night parties in Left Bank clubs such as Jimmy’s. At 30...
I have been a member of a private club up in the Alps since 1959. Its name is the Eagle Ski Club, and I joined it when I was 20 years of age. Sixty years later I’ve resigned as a life member because of an incident I won’t go into, as things that happen in...
OK, all you readers: You are weak, easily manipulated, led by the nose to the gutter, susceptible to the devils of your diabolical urges, and you are crazy. In fact you are the unspeakables, the deplorables who voted for Trump, and a bald, ugly man by the name of Roger Cohen says so. Needless to...
Gee, this is the worst news I’ve had since the defeat at Stalingrad. More than 80 former ambassadors to African nations sent a letter of protest to The Donald. Even worse, Botswana, Ghana, Haiti, Namibia, Senegal, and the African Union have all protested Mr. Trump’s calling them shitholes. I also protest. Shithole is a term...
Had she claimed to be 100-percent African-American, or to be a lesbian, transgender, or simply bisexual, the adoration would have been even more pronounced. If she had a criminal record, the perverse New York Times would have gone bananas, praising her to the skies. Not to mention the British politically correct media, like the BBC,...
If you thought comedy was dead, take a look at the newest Napoleon on the block, the one wearing sandals on his feet and a tablecloth on his head, and striking an heroic pose with his hairy legs wrapped around a camel’s hump. This ludicrous figure resides in Riyadh and is fawned over by people...
I was walking up Madison Avenue when I spotted two comely young women having tea at a sidewalk café. It was a couple of days after the scandal, so I stopped and introduced myself as Harvey Weinstein and asked them if they wanted a drink back at my place. Both roared with laughter. This is...
photo of Jeff Bezos by Steve Jurvetson (CC BY 2.0) Instead of getting life without parole in one of those white isolation cells in the toughest of jails for aiding and abetting terrorism, he is fêted the world over and is among America’s wealthiest men, after Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Step forward, Jeff Bezos...
When the Germans smuggled arguably the world’s most evil man into Russia 100 years ago, they did not imagine the harm they were springing on the human race. Once Lenin had prevailed, he decided to forge a new consciousness, a New Man, as the Bolshies called it, one that would overcome “the antinomies of subjective...
London summer parties are a dime a dozen. The moment the weather turns hot, Englishmen cast aside their brollies and head for a garden party. This year was no different. I spent from the latter part of June until mid-July in England, and went to more parties than there are Trump haters in New York...
Once upon a time the American Establishment enjoyed business paragons such as David Rockefeller, Daniel Ludwig, William S. Paley, Henry Ford II, not to mention Thomas Watson and his son Thomas Watson, Jr. Toward the end of the 20th century, that old power elite had gone with the wind, replaced by people that Hilaire Belloc...
Tempus Fugit. A recent ABC program on the death of Princess Diana reminded me that 20 years have gone by in a jiffy. She died August 31, 1997, following a car crash in the underpass of Place de l’Alma, and sent a nation, and the world, into mourning. Mind you, Princess Di is no longer...
As I’ve often written, The Spectator of London is not only the oldest magazine in the English-speaking world but the most elegant by far. (As, of course, is Chronicles.) I’ve been fortunate to have a column in the Speccie, as readers lovingly refer to it, for 40 years, a lifetime when it comes to journalism. ...
William F. Buckley, Jr., spent his adult winter months in Rougemont, an alpine resort next to its chicer neighbor Gstaad, now the Mecca for the nouveau riche and vulgar. Throughout the 60’s and 70’s, however, the area was known for its music festival run by Yehudi Menuhin, and for celebrity writers like Buckley, my mentor,...
Who was it who said that behind every great fortune lies a great crime? The answer is a Frenchman by the name of Balzac, known in his time as a pretty good novelist. Well, is stealing an idea and making untold billions as a result a great crime? I suppose if it were my idea...
Hollywood is in a snit. Hollywood is very angry. Hollywood is having a nervous breakdown. The Donald is in the White House, and Hollywood types cannot take it any more. Ditto for the New York Times and the TV networks, except for FOX. Madonna, that aging show-off whose vocabulary consists mainly of the F-word, said...
Call me old fashioned, and I will thank you for the compliment. Call me a fool for rosy nostalgia, and more thanks will be in order. Yes, Fred and Ginger are my favorite movie couple, and last year while recuperating from a broken leg, I watched four of their movies back to back, shown on...
It had the same effect on them that a man sitting in a front-row seat and banging a gong has on the lead flutist in a Mozart concert. “Them,” needless to say, are the “elites,” a poor description if ever there was one of the rabble that is Hollywood types, engaged ladies who lunch, cheap...
American writers are on a roll. Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for Literature (for backward children), and Paul Beatty the Booker Prize, the first American to do so because only Brits were considered in previous years. Beatty was the unanimous choice, and it’s easy to see why: He’s a black American, the book is...
All the election of Donald Trump means is that freaks like the ex-heroin dealer Jay-Z and his egregious wife Beyonce will not be taking drugs in the White House come next year. It also means that the foul-mouthed anti-Christian Bill Maher will not be calling the 45th President of the U.S. a scumbag, then invited...
A bunch of charlatans and clowns met in Athens, Greece, at the end of September and, to use an old Greek expression, managed to make a hole in the water. In other words, they accomplished nada, but they stuffed themselves with feta and tasty Greek food, stayed at the best hotels, accepted honorariums, pumped up...
I recently wrote a column for the London Spectator extolling the beauty of one of the Olympic competitors, a British high jumper. She was 19, café au lait, and did not win any medals. But she had wonderful poise, looked very feminine, and had an innocent way about her. Her name is Morgan Lake, and...
The Negresco is a beautiful rococo, belle époque hotel built around the turn of the last century on La Promenade des Anglais in Nice, in the south of France. Even under today’s plebeian standards, when backpacking and sandal-wearing tourists invade its elegant quarters, it stands as a monument to a world that no longer exists. ...
Dancing around an unpleasant reality is what politics is all about nowadays—Donald Trump excluded—with political correctness the enveloping cloud that hides truth and the facts. There are boundaries that are set by those faceless gray men and women none of us ever see, those who control the networks, the newspapers, and the academy—in other words,...
Things have never been grimmer. Wall Street wolves have become billionaires while rigging the system, rats like William Kristol are showboating on television and spreading lies about The Donald, and the most dishonest couple since Bonnie and Clyde are getting themselves ready to reinhabit the White House. In times like these, there is only one...
E.M. Forster infamously said that, if he had to betray his country or a friend, he hoped he would betray the former. He was cheered for it by Oxford swells who had seen their elders slaughtered in the trenches during World War I, and by fellow homosexuals whose proclivities were illegal at the time. This...
Once upon a time, the New York Times called herself the Old Gray Lady; now, truth be told, she’s much closer to a Bitter Old Bag. Long-winded, overexplained, tendentious, and biased against anything normal, the Times is more to be pitied than loathed. And like a festering boil on an old bag’s backside, Donald Trump...