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Basket case

Fifteen years ago, I dusted off my Nantucket Basket, which I’d carried every summer since 1964. To my horror its woven straw was unraveling. The desert climate of Scottsdale, Arizona, where we moved in 2002, had not been kind. When I was a young woman, and received a Nantucket Basket as a gift, I knew it was to be used from Memorial Day until Labor Day. The Baskets have evolved over the last 170 years, from nesting baskets selling for $1.50, to closed baskets used as purses by islanders. Nantucket men wove them in their spare time while serving onboard the South Shoal lightship, off Nantucket. Straw purses are now back for summer. Not that they have ever gone out of style. Many top designers have come out with baskets, including Chanel, Prada and even Hermès.

Henry Jeffreys

The romantic return of Florence’s wine windows

Stroll around Florence and you’ll notice little ornate openings embedded in the walls of Renaissance palazzos. They look like doorways for tiny people, though they would have to be quite athletic tiny people, as the openings are three feet off the ground. But they’re not entrances for Tuscan pixies — they’re for selling wine. There are more than 150 buchette del vino dotted around the city and they date back to the 17th century. You’d knock on the door, hand over some money and a bottle, and the mysterious person behind the wall would fill it full of wine. It wouldn’t have been just any old plonk either; the great merchant houses of the city like Frescobaldi, Ricasoli and Antinori, who still make some of Tuscany’s best wines, would sell in this way.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The problem with progressives

An incident recalled from the days when I still counted out my age in coffee spoons has to do with a political conversation between my parents and two elderly Bostonian spinsters in the days when Republicans, even those of the female persuasion, were not unheard of in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The subject was the second Eisenhower-Stevenson set-to, which from the perspective of the 21st century looks as reserved as a difference of opinion between two members of the New York Yacht Club over a bottle of Evian and cigars. In those days my parents were still-recovering members of the FORWARD WITH ROOSEVELT set, and therefore MADLY FOR ADLAI in the campaigns of 1952 and 1956.

Taki

The lost magic of Palm Beach

Good old Helvetia. I’m quitting her for the rainy but pleasant land of England. The cows are beginning to resemble chorus girls and the village an Alpine Colditz. Too much of a good thing, said a wise man to a friend of mine who wanted to live on the French Riviera all year round. That was long ago. The South of France is a shithole these days — and a very expensive one at that. The real Riviera now lies far away from the coast, up in the hills: Saint-Paul-de-Vence and its environs. The rest of the Côte d’Azur, where Russian and Arab gangsters have bought all the great houses on the water, now reminds me of Baku, where, at the turn of the last century, the Great Game was being played between Russia, Britain and Germany, with Basil Zaharoff triple-crossing all three.

Bill Kauffman

Thelonious Monk deserves the last note

A friend of mine, a lawyer of radical disposition who typically defends nuns who pour blood upon weapons of war, or peace activists who trespass upon military installations, recently told me of his latest case. He is representing a young person who defaced a statue depicting a Confederate soldier. I told him that while I usually applaud his vandal-defendants, I am not in sympathy with this one. The answer to monuments of which one disapproves is not destruction or removal or whinging about your hurt feelings, but rather the creation and emplacement of new monuments. I don’t mean glorifications of dead politicians or military figures — we’ve had enough of those to last a national lifetime, thank you.

Life