Author: Taki Theodoracopulos (Taki Theodoracopulos)

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...

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...

As everyone knows, when you cross a camel with a mule, you get a member of the Saudi ruling family.  A camel crossed with a snake produces a Qatari ruler, and, finally, a camel that’s made whoopee with a pig conceives a Kuwaiti sultan.  Mind you, I’m being a bit rough on these animals, which...

With every passing day, Europe is turning browner and browner, the Old Continent being overrun by a tide of humanity not seen since the upheavals following World War II.  Just think about it: 3,000 migrants from Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Niger, and Eritrea pass daily through the Balkans on their way to Germany, France, Austria, and...

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...

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...

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. ...

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...

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...