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Take three books

Reading good books is like making love. Reading bad ones is like masturbating. I’ve just read three good ones, one of which got on my nerves because it was about…

Swell times

Gstaad

I went to a wonderful party, three days of a non-stop feast. Although not at the Palace, mere hoi polloi were excluded, in theory at least.

There was no…

Blowing hot and cold

I suppose it’s a kind of solace during these snowy times that Norway, the country with the world’s highest per capita income, has not missed a single working day through…

Fourth rate

Arnold Toynbee read Spengler’s The Decline of the West as a young historian at the University of London and had the same reaction as I did when I first read…

Lost cause

Let’s start 2010 right and mention a few honest people in the news. I wrote this sentence a couple of hours ago, not realising how difficult it was going to…

Sentimental journey

Historically, at least in America, people who seek to thrive in the theatre, publishing, on Wall Street, in the media, or even on the gossip columns make their way to…

No hero

The hysteria over Tiger Woods is simply wonderful. Compared with Bill Clinton’s tarts, Tiger’s are of slightly better quality, which is not saying much. The prettiest of the lot, Rachel…

Dubai debacle

When the Marx Brothers announced in 1946 that their upcoming film was called A Night in Casablanca, Warner Bros threatened to sue for breach of copyright. Warner had produced the…

Humour failure

The fourth and last time I debated at the Oxford Union was three or four years ago, and it was a total disaster. The motion was that Katrina’s aftermath was…

Remember the Alamo

It’s good to be in Texas. To a European like me, Texas is why we came to America. It’s a huge state, but more importantly it’s a state of mind.…