Taki

Which is the most infamous bite in history? Surely Adam’s, but then the one Steve Rubbell took off Halston’s leg was far more expensive. Let me explain for you young whippersnappers who’ve probably never heard of these people. (Both died of Aids in 1990.) The bite theme is inspired by Luis Suárez, no stranger to controversy in Britain but a hero in his homeland of Uruguay, where biting is the equivalent to our kissing, or so the volatile Liverpool footballer wants us to believe. I broke the Halston-Rubbell-Bowes-Lyon-Princess Margaret story in this here column back in 1979 or 1980.

New York The search for the two Chechen terrorists in Boston was nothing compared with mine for new digs in the Bagel. And the knowledge accrued while cruising with estate agents the city that never sleeps — for example, did you know that New York has five million, two hundred thousand trees? April is still cold, and the branches are bare, but the pear and cherry trees are in full bloom and soon Manhattan will be under a green canopy. On my way to judo at lunchtime and karate in the evening at Richard Amos’s dojo — he’s a Brit and we’ve been together now 14 years — I witness the spring bird migration, with all sorts of species — they say more than 200 — swooping into the Bagel on their way north.

New York I chose to live on 68th street between Madison and Fifth Avenue because it’s next to Central Park and is considered as convenient an address as any in the city. Not too far uptown and the DMZ — 92nd street; not too close to the shopping shrines down by the 50s. The house where I live now used to be the Austrian consulate and from my second-floor flat I can look into a grand embassy structure that no one ever uses as far as I’m concerned. It belongs to Indonesia, although when I bought my new flat I was told it was the Polish embassy and rushed to close the deal as I love Poles.

New York When the President of the United States has to apologise publicly for calling a woman ‘the best looking attorney general in the country’, I know it’s time to hang up my jock, as we used to say in boarding school. Kamala Harris is a big busty black woman with Asian blood whom I obviously would not ask to vacate my bed, but Obama did not even go that far. All he did was praise her looks and the sisterhood of professional grievance mongers went to work. Some old hag wrote in Salon — whatever that is — that ‘my stomach turned over; those of us who’ve fought to make sure that women are seen as more than ornamental should know better than to rely on flattering the looks of someone as formidable as Harris’.

He was a member of a charmed circle of Hellene and Philhellene intellectuals just before and after the second world war, experiencing modern Greece and seeing it as a place rich in beauty and a stimulus to artistic creation. Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose biography by Artemis Cooper I just put away almost in tears — like a magical night with the girl of one’s dreams, I didn’t want it to end, but end it did — was a second Byron in Greek eyes. I found the book unputdownable, as they say in Boise, Idaho, especially the rich descriptions of rambunctious jaunts to tavernas and places I had spent my youth in.

It felt like a stiletto jab in my liver, a pain so sharp it will take half a century to forget. Jessica Raine — aka Nurse Jenny in Call the Midwife — has shacked up with a married man, an actor and a redhead to boot. It is as if I had heard that my mother had run off with an Albanian gigolo, or Russell Brand. Nurse Jenny is the kind of girl one takes home to mother. Just as Natalia Vodianova is the type one takes to Marcel Proust’s salon. (That’s the frog writer, not a hairdresser.) My fiancée Lindsay Lohan one takes to a motel. Sure, love to most people is a frail little fantasy to be smashed by pride and jealousy, but I’m way above that. No one suffers like I do when that roly-poly cupid takes target practice on my already wounded heart.

To Manchester for an address to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society for the Kilburn Lecture on ‘The Future of the Olympic Games’. The learned society is Britain’s second oldest, after the Royal Society, having been instituted in 1781. John Dalton, the father of modern chemistry, was one of its important past members. My NBF Peter Barnes (I had to explain to him that the acronym meant new best friend) picked me up at the airport and whisked me to Manchester Metropolitan University, and within 45 minutes I had changed into evening clothes and was facing a jolly gathering of bearded professors, smiling ladies and an all-round appreciative audience who laughed at my jokes and were extremely generous with their applause.

‘I was distressed to learn of some of your current problems and wanted to send you a word of encouragement. Since the time Bob Tyrrell introduced us a few years ago, I have been one of your admirers...’ This letter, dated 23 January 1985, was addressed to me and was signed by Richard Nixon. I had it framed and it hangs in my office. The only other letter hanging next to it is from Sir Denis Thatcher, after he and the Lady visited me in Switzerland. Nixon and Thatcher, two vastly misunderstood leaders who one day will be seen rightly as giants among the midgets who preceded and followed them. Lady T I do not know well. President Nixon and I grew close during the late Seventies and Eighties.

Gstaad The Alps are aglow as never before. A record snowfall and an abundance of sun have turned the region into a postcard of long ago. From afar, that is. Up close the cranes are ever-present, although during the season building is verboten . For the past few years I’ve been meeting three Greek childhood friends once a week for lunch in a nearby inn. We drink Swiss white wine, eat trout straight out of the tiny pool they’re kept in, and talk.

Hanky-panky is American slang for doing what comes naturally. In this Valentine’s Day week, I offer you Swoon, a book about great seducers and why women love them — one I knocked off in an afternoon. Written by Betsy Prioleau, it is her second to deal with hanky-panky. (Her first, Seductress, examined history’s most powerful sirens.) Betsy Prioleau is the wife of probably the nicest doctor I’ve ever had, a New York gentleman whose only bad habit is having his practice in the city. What the author tells us is that rather than being cold ladykillers, Romeos love women. In fact, they’re fools for love. I completely agree. The first requirement for a seducer is to be mad about the woman. In order to seduce in general, one needs charm above anything else.

Gstaad  Sir Roger Moore told the Sunday Telegraph that he enjoys the slow pace of life in Switzerland. As do I. One cannot have too much of a snowy peak under a blue sky, any more than one can have too much of Schubert. Looking out from my bedroom window, all I can see are pine forests, rock cliffs and snow, not a bad scene for the winter blues. Yes, Nature has been degraded, with chalets being built ever higher in the mountains, but old N can take it. After a heavy snowfall everything is still, greed takes a back seat, and the only sounds one hears are those of the skis beneath one. I cross-country ski during the busy month of February, the worst time to be in Gstaad because the ‘chic’ people arrive en masse ready to party.

Good for you, Clive, as in James, on your television criticism for the Telegraph. Not many people nowadays know how good a painter Gerald Murphy was. Richard E. Grant pointed this out in his programme The Riviera: A History in Pictures, and Clive praised him for it. Clive James is weak on health but very strong on intellect, and it’s good to read him and his pithy remarks in a paper of value. Gerald Murphy was the model for Dick Diver in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. He was the owner of Mark Cross, a luxury goods store on 5th Avenue, back when luxury goods were beautiful and owned by people with good taste. Gerald and Sara Murphy invented the summer Riviera of the Twenties.

Paris Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter still evoke the verbose sophistry of Sartre, although the tourist and expensive jewellery trades have replaced the ‘rendez-vous des intellectuels’. Yet the sheer stunning beauty of the 7ème reminds one why Paris is still the most romantic capital in Europe, the city Papa Hemingway called a fine place to be young in, and that it’s a necessary part of a man’s education.

Gstaad The sub-primate level of conversation, as prevalent as the snow up here in the Alps, took a turn for the better last week while a select few celebrated Prince Nicolas Romanoff’s 90th birthday. Yes, most people who live up here are illiterate, but they sure know how to count, some even up to ten billion. None of the counters was present at the birthday, however, given at the yacht club by Dino Goulandris for the head of the tragic Romanoff house, just many old friends who included some of Europe’s oldest and most royal families. No camel drivers, thank you very much, no Russian oligarchs, just Former People , as Douglas Smith named his heartbreaking book on the final days of the Russian aristocracy.