Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

High Life

Taki

Wednesday, 25th June 2008

Sporting chance

By the time you read this I will have a pretty good idea whether my 70-and-over judo world title will belong to some Mongolian monster or be retained by yours truly. Unpredictability is to sport what lying is to Clinton and Blair — a compelling stimulus — but my chances in Brussels are beginning to resemble those of the Belgian army facing the invading Germans back in 1940. Having trained hard all spring in the Bagel, it all went down the drain in two weeks living the high life in London and Devon. As good an excuse as any, and fun to boot.

Speaking of Blair and Clinton, I am reliably informed that Arpad Busson’s ‘Diary’ in the 14 June Speccie is up for a Pulitzer Prize. And it makes me very proud. Only a Pug’s Club member would have the insight to find greatness in those two bull artists, hence a prize is well deserved. Ditto for the hedgies being a force for good in the world. That they are — for luxury goods, that is. Working for others is what hedge funders do, and God forbid that anyone would accuse them of greed. Mind you, there are those who suffer from Spenglerian pessimism and believe hedgies are pretty grabby and have driven the economy south with their greed, but now that Arkie has set us straight everything is hunky-dory.

Pug’s Club, incidentally, has just voted in our 12th member, George Livanos, the Erwin Rommel of Greek shipowners, as he’s known among us cognoscenti. Which means the club is now one fourth Greek, and as Heinrich von Fürstenberg has just been elected a member of the world’s Best-Dressed List, Pug’s can claim that a quarter of its members are among the earth’s best-dressed people. (Eat your heart out, White’s.)

1 | 2 | 3 Next page

ghostof'lectricity

June 27th, 2008 2:12am

Tim Russert's death brought America to a standstill? Is this in Bizarro World, or is Taki simply lying, something at which he is so astute. Oh, I get it! Russert actually WORKED FOR A LIVING, something of which Taki the decadent crap-bag has no concept, just as he has no concept of matrimonial loyalty, human decency, or politesse. He thinks he's funny and clever when he points out a dead man's weight problem. Apparently Russert didn't meet the connoisseur Taki's esthetic standards for physical beauty. Lest you think I'm biased, I hardly watched Russert (my Sunday mornings are consumed with chores, followed by treadmill/stationary bike workouts of several hours' duration, accompanied by the Sunday NYT) and didn't care much about him one way or the other. Still, a young man dying suddenly while ACTUALLY ON THE JOB, is a shock, though hardly one that brought "America to a standstill." But then, Taki's familiarity with truth and reality is no deeper or broader than his humility, sense of proportionality, or concept of caring for other human beings. Go to hell, Taki, and make the world a better place.

David Lindsay

June 27th, 2008 5:59pm

"The money-obsessed career politicians of today alone make de Gaulle a great man."

They certainly do. As does so very much else about that good conservative dirigiste in opposition to the capitalist corrosion of everything that conservatives exist in order to conserve. Inseparable therefrom was his glorious battle against all four of German occupation, Soviet infiltration, American domination, and the unbalancing of the nascent EU by British accession.

On all four counts de Gaulle was right, as he would have been, for exactly the same reasons, if faced with today's neocon-Islamic alliance in the midst of the Postmodern, globalised, hypercapitalist, meterosexual wasteland.

And new de Gaulle is just what France needs.

And so does Britain.

Where are they?