To Martha’s Vineyard for the weekend, wearing brand-new cowboy boots, jeans with a giant Texan belt-buckle, and carrying a black Stetson onto the plane in my hand-luggage. Yes, of course I looked absurd, but Lynn de Rothschild’s invitation to Sir Evelyn’s 80th and Bill Clinton’s 65th birthday party said ‘Dress: Western’, and I’m no party-pooper. We drank mojitos, ate burgers and grits, and line-danced in a big, hay-filled barn — Hillary’s surprisingly agile, and whoops with the best of them — before local girl Carly Simon sang for us, looking deep into Bill’s eyes as she crooned ‘You’re so Vain’. Bill told my wife Susan and me something rather shocking about one of the Republican presidential frontrunners, unrepeatable in a family magazine such as this. If it’s true, the race is still wide open…

•••

We’ve had biblical weather here in New York, with a 5.9 Richter-scale earthquake, and then Hurricane Irene, which was the width of western Europe and affected a population the size of Great Britain. I missed the earthquake because the people upstairs were having a piano installed through their 28th-storey window, so I mistook the vibrations for that, and then I slept soundly through the hurricane, so I feel slightly short-changed. Overall, people have behaved with almost Britannic aplomb here, with virtually no hysteria for the news channels to put on their 24-hour loops, although I think the two lads who were stopped by police from going out kayaking on the Hudson River were taking sangfroid a tad too far. Brooklyners claim to have ‘beaten the twister’, as it entered the borough as a hurricane, but left as a mere super-tornado.

•••

Speaking of glorious veterans, Mike Bloomberg threw a party for the 20th anniversary of the Charlie Rose Show, easily the best programme on American TV and a standing reproach to British TV’s failure to have anything like it since the demise of Melvyn Bragg’s South Bank Show. Every week Charlie, a tall, courtly North Carolinian, conducts three intellectually stimulating, in-depth, hour-long interviews with Nobel Prize-winning scientists, authors, film directors and other substantial global figures. The people appearing on a short video teasing Charlie at the start of the party included Warren Buffett, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart and Rupert and Wendi Murdoch. Marlon Brando, who for some reason codenamed himself ‘Branflakes’ when he used to ring the show, once asked Charlie: ‘What are you going to do with all this knowledge?’ He answered that he used it every day to think up the next question. I asked whether in the 12,000 interviews he’s conducted he ever just couldn’t think of a question? He replied that having to make conversation with grown-ups when working behind the counter in his father’s store meant that he was never stumped for something to ask.

•••

If Charlie’s 20 years at the forefront of American culture is impressive, how about 30? That’s how long the New Criterion — small, pugnacious, highbrow, conservative monthly magazine edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball — has been going. Its reputation was formed as much by its enemies as its friends. From the beginning they attributed much more influence to it than it actually exerted, until, that is, it gradually caught up with their rhetoric and became what John O’Sullivan has rightly described as ‘the best cultural review in the world’.

•••

To the Waldorf Astoria to interview Dick Cheney for his excellent autobiography, In My Time. Like so many people demonised by the Left — Ken Starr, Norman Tebbit, James Murdoch, Paul Wolfowitz also come to mind — Cheney is charming, good-natured and great company, with a fine sense of humour (by which I mean he laughs at my jokes). Of Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to cancel his subscription to the New York Times after a particularly puerile and vicious attack on him, Dick said that the only surprise was that Don still had a subscription in the first place.  

•••

Having been persecuted viciously and libellously by Johann Hari for years, of course I’ve been quietly enjoying his recent tribulations, especially the witty destructions of him from Nick Cohen, Giles Coren and the Speccie’s own Toby Young. My question is: if cheating and impersonation are not enough to get you sacked from the Indy, what actually is?

•••

Andrew Roberts’s most recent book, The Storm of War, is published by Penguin.

This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated