The newspaper that prints only what fits its piously fraudulent agenda, the New York Times, has reviewed a book by one Ta-Nehisi Coates twice, both times showering it with the sort of praise that would make a Hollywood name-dropper blush. A biweekly magazine, New York, which reports mostly on food and gay porn, put the...
For those who like to see their name in print, the Hiltons and Kardashians of this world, make sure that, when the man in the white suit visits you, you’re the only one he’s dropping in on. In fact, even if the white-suited gent visits you within a day or two of having called upon...
It was, in Edward de Vere’s words, much ado about nothing. The media didn’t think so, called it Deflategate, and one of America’s great sporting heroes, Tom Brady, was pilloried as if he had inflated the beautiful model Gisele Bundchen, his wife, against her wishes. In case any of you Chronicles readers missed it while...
Talk about the failure of fundamental journalism! In any other profession—medical, legal, financial—the guilty party would be struck off. In journalism, the guilty party—as in Rolling Stone—continues on its merry way of disinformation and downright fabrication. Some Duke University lacrosse players must be nodding their heads, as in we’ve seen it all before. Let’s start...
“There is no more potent instrument of fate in 19th-century fiction than the legacy.” So writes a female columnist in Britain’s best newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, before going on to say some rude things about trust-fund babies. According to the lady, a will stands as a symbol of the “baleful power of crabbed old age...
The week after the murdering scum of ISIS beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya—their crime was being Christian—the European Commission opened an investigation of Christian schools in Britain for allegedly “discriminating” against nonreligious teachers. In other words, the unelected bureaucrats of Brussels want to force Christian schools to stop giving preference to religious staff while...
I am not Charlie, nor will I ever be. Wearing a Je suis Charlie badge is one sure way of getting attention, but I will leave that to others. And another thing: Obscenity has no redeeming social value, and Charlie Hebdo was and is one long obscenity. But let’s start with that famous Parisian march...
If I were a North Korean leader, or even an ISIS head chopper, I’d be reveling in the fact that a former American black basketball star spoke more plainly about race in America than any member of our political class or media. Charles Barkley doesn’t mince words. Many of his fellow blacks were not pleased...
I was not surprised that Chuck Hagel had to go. After all, he was among the very few in governments of late to have ever seen combat, not to mention to have been wounded. Men of his ilk do not draw their swords at the drop of a hat—unlike neocons, that is, who demand bloody...
Opera has been in the news lately—in Paris and New York, that is. And no, this doesn’t mean things are culturally looking up—to the contrary, I’m afraid. Let’s start with the City of Light, where millions of Muslims surround the capital (most of them in the suburbs), waiting for the day they can sweep away...
The latest brouhaha about professional football players beating up their little wimmen has me shocked, shocked! that such a thing could take place in modern-day America, Home of the Depraved. But before I go on about why black football multimillionaires don’t get enough violence on the playing field but have to bring it home with...
An American friend who is very well connected in Washington, D.C., was telling me he’s worried about Europe. “So what else is new?” I said. “No, I really mean it. Future generations could grow up under Islamic rule.” It was a John McEnroe moment, as in You can’t be serious. He assured me he was. ...
Boo to the CIA! It got caught spying on Germany, and its top man in Berlin has been sent home. What I’d like to know is what’s so important about Berlin’s open-book policies that we had to play dirty? Maybe our ex-top man in the German capital should now concentrate on weeding out Israeli spies...
The greatest criminal and most profitable enterprise in the world is FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association). As I write, billions are watching obscenely overpaid footballers competing for a cup that is long overdue for a total remake. The World Cup was a very good idea long ago, but so was selective democracy and waging...
I write this while American unmanned flights and 18 American “specialists” are looking for those 200 unfortunate girls abducted by Boko Haram, a group our very own Hillary Clinton had refused to place on the State Department’s terrorist watch list. Boko Haram is as bad as it gets and as violent as can be, but...
I never listen to pop music, but I do know the difference between the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. I even know one of the Stones’ daughters, Theodora Richards, as she went out with the son of a friend who brought her aboard my boat. (Incredibly, she had very good manners.) Pink Floyd—it’s a band—I...
One of the great knee-slappers, however perverse, of the so-called War on Terror is the fact that fundamentalist Islamic forces are stronger than ever as a result. It is like going on a crash diet for a month and putting on 20 pounds. In the 12 years since George W. first uttered those three little...
One of life’s safest bets is that, following a visit by a Japanese premier to the shrine that honors the nation’s war dead, a lot of Chinese megacrooks and inheritors of the greatest murderer of all time will cry foul, and lots of buffoons of the neocon and liberal persuasion over here will echo them. ...
From the top of the mountain that overlooks my Swiss chalet I can almost see Lake Geneva on a clear day, but thankfully, what I cannot see are the armies of so-called diplomats, flunkies, arms dealers, professional wallet lifters, con men, thieves, and men who have obviously been conceived by apes with a dose of...
One of the great but perverse pleasures of my life when I’m in New York City is to read the New York Times. It’s perverse because no paper north of Saudi Arabia lies quite as blatantly as the Times does, its lying based on omission rather than invention, and by the use of the kind...
I recently sat down with a friend of more than 50 years, Reinaldo Herrera, and was filmed by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, also an old friend, while lunching and discussing the past. The Herrera house is a grand one, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and Graydon’s idea was to film...
Like all proper banana republics, the Olive Republic of Greece has jailed some elected members of parliament, charging them with criminality, as obscure and vague an accusation as hooliganism used to be when Uncle Joe Stalin was displeased with some Russian writer. Stalin used dissidents for target practice; the present gang in power in the...
A man whose reputation rivals that of the Clintons for dishonesty and lies recently claimed he overheard a gangster confirming that Bobby Riggs had thrown his match against Billie Jean King in the infamous Battle of the Sexes on September 20, 1973. King won 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. According to the Clinton-wannabe, Bobby was $100,000 in...
Cicero was a wise human being who wrote that a man with a garden and a library has all he needs. He also said that only a man without a brain tweets. (Well, he would have said it, were he around today.) The Oxford philosopher John Gray, a man I used to get drunk with...
If I hear or read one more American hack mentioning the word democracy where Egypt and the Middle East are concerned, I swear on Joe Biden’s hair-implanted head that I shall go in front of the Capitol and commit seppuku, the Japanese warrior’s way of leaving this life. (Just kidding: I shall wait for the...
Why is it that summers used to last so much longer back then? School would be out in early June, and by the time horrid September rolled around, it seemed three years had passed. What fun it was to be young, and for it to be summer! No homework, no need to stay in shape,...
If you thought comedy was dead, think again. There’s always John Podhoretz, the ferociously bellicose neocon who makes Patton and Rommel sound like popinjays when he thunders away, urging Uncle Sam to attack and crush his enemies wherever they might be hiding. Beating the war drums is very old hat here in the good old...
I write this during the weekend that finally saw the end of those two dreadful Chechens who were described by many newspapers—starting with the New York Times, of course—as typical American teenagers. Some Americans, is all that comes to mind. Why is it that after every outrage family members and friends of the perpetrators are...
OK, the tenth anniversary of the worst foreign blunder Uncle Sam has ever committed has come and gone, but the post-anniversary headlines remain the same: “Explosions in Baghdad kill dozens and wound scores” (International Herald Tribune, March 20); “For Iraqis, no time for reflection, only desperation” (op. cit., March 19); “Iraq War Intelligence Was a...
I’ve been writing a lot about Hollywood lately, what with yet another version of The Great Gatsby coming out, this time with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role of James Gatz. The best Gatsby until now was Alan Ladd, in a 40’s black-and-white movie I saw 50 years ago. Perhaps it was my youth, but...
In a tiny hamlet next to where I live, high up in the Swiss Alps, two gay friends of mine have set up house, and a beautiful old chalet it is. One, a German, is straight out of central casting of a Panzer commander; the other, an Englishman, more P.G. Wodehouse than John Bull. Both...
The latest school massacre has all the do-gooders crying for more gun control, yet few have touched upon the blood-splattering, shoot-’em-up electronic games that the unhinged nerd who murdered 27 people in Newtown, Connecticut, played. His favorite was Call of Duty, a first-person-shooter game where participants use assault rifles, machine guns, and other weapons to...
This is the best news I’ve had since both the governor of the state of New York and a congressman from the depraved city of New York had to resign because of sex scandals. The latest good news is that Saudi Arabia will not have Uncle Sam to kick around much longer. Unfortunately, the kicking...
Back in 1839, an Englishman by the name of Alexander Walker wrote a manual by the name of Woman, in which he quoted Hume: “Among the inferior creatures, nature herself, being the supreme legislator, prescribes all the laws which regulate their marriages, and varies those laws according to the different circumstances of the creature.” So...
Bernie Ecclestone is a gnomish Brit ex-grease monkey who is my neighbor in Gstaad, the small alpine Swiss village that once upon a time was the Mecca of the old rich and titled, now slowly turning into the playground of the nouveau riche and vulgar. I’ve often written about Bernie because, for a very short...
Here we go again! Scary sofa-samurai Robert Kagan, a neocon foreign-policy “scholar,” is also an expert on war, having watched a lot of Hollywood movies. Kagan says that, if Obama were to use force against Iran, the election would be over—he would win overwhelmingly. Kagan and his brother are inside-the-Beltway hucksters, always hustling and doing...
Nicholas Soames is Winston Churchill’s grandson—his mother being Winny’s only living child—a Conservative member of Parliament since the mid-70’s, a very large man whose food and drink intake is legendary, and an old friend of mine with whom I used to get into terrible trouble (but the less said about that the better). Soames has...
Back in September 1970 I found myself in Damascus, as charming a city as it is ancient, the natives friendly and helpful, especially as I was suffering from food poisoning thanks to a Lebanese kebab from two days before. My stay in the city was interrupted by the sudden death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the...
Greece is certainly female. Like the fair sex, she changes her mind nonstop. One day she sleeps with the German suitor; the next she decides to declare her independence from the Kraut and go it alone. Finally, she chooses both—the moneybags and her freedom. After all, she’s Greek, and she thinks that rules do not...
In John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation, a young black con man traduces his way into a white, rich, liberal family’s midst by posing as the college son of Sidney Poitier who has lost his credit card and wallet. The guilt-ridden rich folk put him up with the predictable results. The family is almost...
Here we go again, sports fans! During a recent tennis match between two professionals in Indian Wells, California, a racial slur uttered by one of the players has the usual suspects up in arms. The first off the bat was, of course, the newspaper that prints only what fits p.c., the dreadful Big Bagel Times. ...
I was sad to read that the Attikon Cinema on Stadiou Street in central Athens was burned down by anarchist scum pretending to protest against the E.U. Nazis. The Attikon was built in 1870 as part of a beautiful, ochre-colored neoclassical edifice constructed by a German architect, only to be torched 142 years later by...
No matter how one looks at it, it wasn’t Italy’s finest hour. Not even Gabrielle d’Annunzio, poet, patriot, propagandist, and protofascist, could spin this into a maritime Titanic-like drama. Once the Costa Concordia hit a rock off the Tuscan coast, the behavior of the passengers and crew became an adverb, as in cowardly. This much...
When I was last in the Big Bagel, as I call Noo Yawk, an heroic policeman with countless commendations for bravery and 22 years of front-line service was murdered in cold blood by a black drug dealer, Lamont Pride, the latter having previously been let loose by a black female judge who ignored a warrant...
I haven’t seen J. Edgar, the Hollywood movie about J. Edgar Hoover, and I don’t plan to, even though I have loved all of Clint Eastwood’s films, especially those he’s directed. Yet J. Edgar does not do it for me, as they say. It’s based on a lie, and a monstrous one at that: Hoover...
A recent libel case won by Lady Moore, wife of Sir Roger Moore of James Bond fame, called for my testimony in London, and for once I was happy to oblige. Roger Moore is a friend of very long standing, as is his son, Geoffrey, who lives 50 yards away from me in Gstaad. British...
The black American fugitive who was recently caught after 41 years on the lam brought back lots of memories. No, I’ve never been a fugitive from justice, and the memories are quite pleasant, because I met all those so-called Black Liberation Army con men in Algeria just about the time George Wright flew in from...
I first visited England in 1953, when I was 16 years old. It was a very different country back then, a green and pleasant place, where weekend cinemas were packed with enthusiastic movie fans all cheerfully whistling and applauding the action. The film palaces were thick with tobacco smoke, and no one left his seat...
On September 1, 1957, a pretty French girl by the name of Patricia and an Italo-French couple, Feruccio and Ellen, joined me in the old harbor of Cannes waiting to board the super-new luxury liner Cristoforo Colombo. Our destination was Capri, and we had decided to go on the spur of the moment. Capri’s season...
I first met Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor in the summer of 1977, in Corfu. I was on board Gianni Agnelli’s boat, and the charismatic Fiat chairman asked me to go ashore and bring “a very smart Englishman whose Ancient Greek is much better than yours.” I knew Paddy, as everyone called him, by sight, because...