Clive James has a high-maintenance girlfriend: the reader. To educate this girlfriend, to correct her wayward mind and haphazard schooling, he has written more than 100 loosely related essays on artists, intellectuals and tyrants, mostly of the 20th century—a crash course in modern history and culture. His selection is idiosyncratic, and his structure organic, like Read More
God preserve us from the British upper classes! They are the reason I left England. I decided that I couldn’t listen to their whining sense of entitlement for one second longer, and thus fled to New York, where I promptly discovered that everyone worships the British upper classes.
It’s all frightfully unfortunate, actually. When God Read More
Fashion Week hasn’t even started yet and the claws are already out.
In yet the latest example of the fierce competition for Brazilian beauties, Men/Women N.Y. Model Management (“Women Management”) is suing Next Model Management, among others, for over $2 million in New York State Supreme Court.
In a case filed on Sept. 2, Read More
Bright Young Things , by Brooke de Ocampo and Jonathan Becker. Assouline, $50, 188 pages.
Pity the coffee table that is blighted with Brooke de Ocampo’s big new picture book about her rich friends, Bright Young Things . It is an appalling tome, and on so many levels.
Let’s start with the title, Read More
In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies , a gossip columnist takes vengeance on his readers “with sultan-esque caprice” by telling them of inaccessible eating houses that he claims are the center of fashion. As a result, the Bright Young Things of London are led to temperance dance halls in Bloomsbury, to cafés where they are Read More
On Oct. 29, The Times Literary Supplement held a party at the National Arts Club for its new editor, Ferdinand Mount, and the New York Brits came out in force to wine and sport: A writer friend called me “a girl” when I started to say something in earnest; a slender, semifamous writer mocked the Read More
