Some people keep reading matter in their lavatories, though whether for their own benefit or that of their visitors I have never been able to determine—nor have I ever asked. I suppose that it comes in handy if you’re constipated, though this is a problem from which, as yet, I have never ...

These days, people of supposedly high caliber, or at least of high position, have difficulty in distinguishing vehemence of expression from depth of feeling, or even of thought. I may on occasion have made that mistake myself, since none of us is perfect, but it is my impression that what was once ...

A long-lived creature from Mars, who had paid the earth visits over several centuries, would be very much struck by modern man’s thirst for, or indifference to, ugliness. He, she, or it would have noticed that, precisely at a time when humanity had more disposable income than at any other time in ...

I hold no brief for the tobacco companies and have no shares in them. I detest the habit, perhaps because my father smoked an evil pipe whose product had been well described by James I in his anti-smoking diatribe of 1604, A Counterblaste to Tobacco. It (my father’s pipe) emitted a “horrible ...

No one, I imagine, would include a speech by Donald Trump in an anthology of succinctness or political eloquence. Whether he is too lazy to organize his thoughts, or simply incapable of doing so, I cannot say; I can say only that if I were in his audience, I should be furious at his apparent ...

Whenever I hear the word equity, my heart sinks, though I won’t go as far as to say that I reach for my Browning. My irritation on hearing the word is recent, however: I don’t think I would have reacted the same way forty years ago, when it was rarely used outside the context of the law. Woke ...

Recently, I read a splendid book, titled Homo cretinus, by the French science journalist and writer Olivier Postel-Vinay, on the subject of human stupidity, a subject as perpetually amusing as murder, and eternally relevant to the situation we are in. Stupidity is a much-underestimated factor in ...

Some years ago, I asked the owner of the Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, the only specialist secondhand poetry store in Britain, whether he had any books by poets with one leg. He said, perhaps not surprisingly, that it was the first time that he had ever been asked the question. I knew of only ...

Twenty-seven years ago, a British newspaper discovered—I don’t know how—that I hadn’t watched television for twenty-five years. At the time, this seemed almost incredible, or at any rate very odd, as if I had just landed from Mars. The newspaper contacted me and asked me whether I would be ...

From time to time I receive, unsolicited, messages from insurance companies about “how to keep myself safe,” to use an odious modern locution. Mostly they are about the weather, reminding me that ice is slippery, or that the sun can be hot—for, as Shakespeare observed more than 400 years ago, ...