Author: Andrei Navrozov

  I begin with house statistics since the day before New Year’s.  We’ve had five guests staying here, all Russian in varying degree, including a Viennese lady by the name of Inga who, even when the lighting is all wrong, looks like a film noir star of the 1940’s.  Suffice it to say that an admirer had given the diva a riding crop for Christmas, which she kindly brandished for us of an evening while wearing, in an effortlessly choreographed sequence, three wigs she had providently packed in her luggage, a blonde, a brunette, and I think a redhead. As...

An extraordinary episode set Moscow’s beau monde on its ear last week–extraordinary in the sense that, if a cannibal, instead of boiling an Englishman in the nude, were to eat him together with his bowler hat, silk umbrella, and brogues by John Lobb of St. James’s Street, this might be considered outrageous cannibal behavior.  “What an extraordinary way to act at table,” other, more fastidious cannibals would be heard muttering. A veteran journalist by the name of Viktor Shenderovich was interviewed on “Moscow Echo”–supposedly the last oasis of dissent yet extant in the Russian media mainstream–and made some remarks about...

  Gentle reader may remember that I was in London last week in aid of a friend charged with racism for calling a Negro cabdriver an ape.  Fine arguments marshaled by the defense came to naught once the female judge had had a good look at the defendant’s shoes. These were polished to a high shine, and clean shoes are, as the defendant ought to have known at his age, a telltale sign of racist attitudes in white males.  He was found guilty and fined. Lest my reader think I am being facetious, I draw his attention to this post’s...

  A funny story, this, but it also kind of makes you want to cry, a perfect combination for a Wednesday’s child broadside– especially in Advent, with its heritage of Dickensian, bittersweet tales of moral instruction. I am in London this week to help out a friend who got himself in trouble. A few months ago, returning from a dinner party in a state of more than slight inebriation, he hailed a black cab – you know the kind, the retro thingie with a doorframe high enough to accommodate a man wearing a top hat, the legendary vehicle that makes...

You know me, folks. You know that when I hear the phrase “human rights” I release the safety catch of my Browning, or at least spit on the floor to register contempt.  Like “social diversity,” which is its opposite in real life–and like a thousand other weasel phrases too noxious to enumerate here–that neologism is not only not a synonym of individual liberty, but often its functional antonym.  So you will not think less of me if I mention something called the European Court of Human Rights in other than a derisory way. Some nine years ago a man in...

  I realize that visual observation alone, whether at its focus is human illness or social mores, is rarely conclusive when it comes to diagnostics, but that, ladies and gentlemen, is all I’ve got.  Parting with $100 in a café here is a foregone conclusion, while in the food halls of the Galleries Lafayette two bucks will buy you a piece of chocolate measuring one cubic centimetre. And yet this city eats like Rome, with the diners, like Olympic swimmers in the final yards of the race, twisting their apoplectically speckled necks this way and that, as though coming up...