Low life | 7 June 2018

On Monday night I went to a party at the Crazy Horse nightclub in Paris thrown by the oligarch Vitaly Malkin. He’s written a 500-page philosophy book called Dangerous Illusions and threw the party to celebrate it’s simultaneous publication in five European countries. Essentially the book is a polemic against religion. Enjoy life while you can is the message: there ain’t no after-life. Why a Russian billionaire should go to the trouble of writing and publishing atheist polemic then invite me to the launch party, and pay for my travelling expenses and a hotel room, was mystifying, so I googled him. According to his Wikipedia profile, Vitaly Malkin is a living saint with a profound interest in female genital mutilation. In spite of this he has been unfortunately maligned over the years. None of the accusations have been proven in a court of law, however. A fair bit of his Wikipedia profile is taken up with blow-by-blow accounts of trials and legal wrangles. In spite of his clean record, Canada, the country he most wants to live in, has refused him a passport. It all seems terribly unfair.

The Crazy Horse is an old-fashioned burlesque club in the seedy Pigalle district of Paris — all carpets and mirrors and swirling coloured lights. Normally it costs €200 to get in and a bottle of champagne costs an arm and a leg. On Monday night Vitaly Malkin proved to me, at any rate, what a kind and uncomplicated man he must be by providing me and 300 of his friends a night of free champagne and strippers. The champagne was Perrier Jouet; the strippers were top drawer.

There were six of them. When they danced in a line on the stage they were an arresting sight, not least because they were identical in height and build and their breasts were all exactly the same size and shape.