Given that it hasn't yet got properly cold here, it feels like a very strange hallucination. In a naked effort to make us forget that we are living in an economic meltdown, the stores are full of Christmas trees and fairy lights. Their illusion makes you feel you are in...

In January 1995, Veronica DeGruyter Beracasa de Uribe Hearst gave an intimate lunch for Diana, Princess of Wales, in her opulent apartment on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 66th Street. The Princess was in New York to give an award to the then editor of Harper's Bazaar magazine and...

For a moment last week, around midnight on Tuesday, we all went mad with joy. Mad in a way I've never seen or heard. As I went to bed around 4am I could still hear the screams from people in the street: "We did it." Emails came in from friends...

If you weren't in Times Square tonight, the only place to be was downtown in the West Village at Gavin Brown's gallery for an installation by Jonathon Horowitz called Obama '08.

Hundreds of artists, including Piotr Uklanski and Elizabeth Peyton along with collector Peter Brant, model Jessica Joffe and one...

When I first heard of of the passing of Madelyn Dunham, 86, grandmother of Barack Obama, my reaction was like that of my friends: "Oh no. How tragic she missed this by just a few hours: the likely culmination of an historic journey to the Presidential nomination by her own...

We're finally here: today is Election Day. You could cut the tension with a knife. Many of my friends have been stumping in swing states for Obama over the weekend, terrified that at the last moment a "Bradley effect" could rob him of the victory the polls predict. I don't...

The other evening I went as a guest of friends to a dinner to raise money for a hospital in New York. This was the same hospital where my twins were prematurely born. On entering this world they weighed only 2 pounds and 3 ounces respectively, but went on to...

I love the concept of the "Smash Shack" the store opened in San Diego, where according to CBS News, victims of the credit crisis are taking out their frustrations by buying fragile objects and hurling them against the wall.

I haven't got to that place mentally myself. But nonetheless...

Recently, CNBC interviewed me for an hour-long special documentary on high-class prostitution, due to air on November 11 at 10pm and 1am -- a date and time when hopefully we will no longer be worried about politics and our minds will be back on the important stuff: illegal sex.

CNBC...

Back before the fall of Lehman Brothers and the global economic collapse, I had a dirty little secret: my weekly addiction to the TV series Gossip Girl, about the absurdly rarefied lives of a fictional group of wealthy New York teenagers. Now ratings for the show are soaring: more than...

"How poor are you?" That's what formerly rich guys ranging from hedge-fund kings and tech pioneers to bankers and trust-fund heirs are now asking each other at dinners around town.

This group doesn't care who ends up buying Wachovia. That's all background news; just one more sorry piece of detail...

Last week saw not just the initial failure of Hank Paulson's bail-out bill but also the death of the $800 bottle of wine.

"It's just not OK to have that on your expenses at a time like this," one restaurateur says he has been told by banker clients. In this...

Last week saw not just the initial failure of Hank Paulson's bail-out bill, but also the death of the $800 bottle of wine.

"It's just not OK to have that on your expenses at a time like this," one restaurateur says he has been told by banker clients. In this...

On June 16 royal photographers waiting to capture Britain's Prince William, 26, in flowing velvet robes outside St. George's Chapel, in Windsor, were caught by surprise. Just before the start of the 660-year-old ceremony, in which the Prince was to be made a Royal Knight of the Garter, a car...

Alberto Vilar once promised so many millions to both New York's Metropolitan Opera and London's Royal Opera House that his name was engraved in both places -- only to be removed in 2005, when prosecutors charged him with stealing most of his fortune.

But the former financier said that what...

"I understand why the British are livid," said a friend (American) who is high up at Lehman. My friend was talking about the Sunday front page headlines -- screaming that a $2.5 billion bonus pot was being retained -- from the English bankruptcy court -- by Barclays to pay eight...

For some reason, in the last week or so I've had a series of lunches and dinners with friends who are male, single, over 35 and never-married. Men like this were traditionally labelled playboys, a term implying they possessed a rakish charm and a wariness of settling.

New York is...

The phone has rung off the hook all weekend. "Are you OK?" I've asked friends whose husbands have been at Lehman Brothers. No, of course they are not. They just saw everything they've worked for go down the drain. A lunch barbecue with a Lehman executive who has been there...

Like 37 million American viewers last Wednesday night, I sat transfixed as I watched the previously unknown figure of Sarah Palin turn herself into the angel of the Republican party. But the burning issue in my mind was: what is a hockey mom? OK: I am British, and I've never...

FRANCE--Friday saw a brilliant move by John McCain in choosing Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old governor of Alaska, to be his running-mate. Theoretically, if you look at the polls which had McCain close to the Obama-Biden ticket before this announcement, his appointment of Palin ought to make up for all his...