Donald trump

New York Talk about high life this is not. I smelled a rat long ago, but then the scent got weaker and weaker. Now it’s back — and stronger than ever. I’m talking here, of course, about the Saudis, the Qataris and the son-in-law who has also risen, Jared Kushner. Almost a year ago the Saudis issued an ultimatum to Qatar to meet its list of demands or face a blockade by Saudi-allied countries in the Gulf. All sorts of accusations were made and the Qataris were given 24 hours to comply. While the 300,000 Qatari citizens froze en masse, the couple of million non-Qatari migrant workers went about their

New York ‘What do we do with these men?’ thundered a New York Times headline. It was followed by a frothing-mouthed, overwrought hissy fit worthy of an Oscar in the overacting category. The men in question are the usual suspects: media people and Hollywood types who have been accused by the weaker sex of sexual harassment. Oh boy! Is this place going nuts or what? Spring is here, the girls are in their summer dresses — not really, they all wear leggings — and all one hears about is the bestiality of the stronger sex. The question is: who is next? The bookies are having a field day. ‘Under what

A week ago I plucked my eight-year-old grandson Oscar from the bosom of his rumbustious young family and took him on an orange aeroplane to Nice, and from there up into the hills of the upper Var to spend 11 days in our breeze-block shack. His second visit. On his first, last August, the temperature hit 45 degrees Celsius and we were roasted alive. This one, though, was relentlessly cold and wet and the mop and bucket were in constant use in the living room. Confined to barracks, we played Dobble, a card game akin to snap, but more complicated and requiring sharper wits. Several games of Dobble revealed beyond

New York If Albanian television had shown the programme CBS did last week — with a woman who has sex on camera for a living describing how she had unprotected Bing-Bing with the president — I think even Albanians would feel so diminished they’d move to Kosovo. But this is America, and it’s a woman’s, woman’s, woman’s world! Or perhaps a frontal lobe is missing. The degree of reverence afforded to a porn actress by Anderson (kiss me) Cooper was astonishing. His smouldering gaze of restraint was touching, as was his phony squint of chagrin that no protection was used. See what I mean about moving to Kosovo? But this

Nine years ago, before Cambridge Analytica existed, I caught wind of a research project at Cambridge involving the online measurement of the ‘big five’ personality dimensions. These are usually listed by the acronym OCEAN or CANOE: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness and Extraversion. I made a note to go to Cambridge to learn more but, being low on conscientiousness, I never got around to it. Perhaps I dodged a bullet by not getting involved. When people say ‘It’s the early bird that catches the worm’, I always reply, ‘Yes, but what about the early worm?’ Besides, does personality alone predict behaviour? Perhaps not as much as Cambridge Analytica promised. True, had