Polonius: Do you know me, my lord? Hamlet: Excellent well; you are a fishmonger. —Hamlet When Hamlet, playing the lunatic, calls the king’s chief counselor, Polonius, a fishmonger, he knows that Polonius will think him not only mad but insulting. So important and consequent a man a mere ...

A creative writing course at a British university has withdrawn graduation requirement that students should attempt a sonnet, not on the reasonable grounds that it is futile to try to turn people with cloth ears for language into sonneteers, but because the sonnet is a literary form that is white ...

There is nothing a strong government likes more than a weak people; and therefore, whether consciously or not, everything is done to render the people ever feebler. Not physically, of course, we are raising up giants of a size and strength never before seen, as can be seen on any sports field, but ...

Error, says the psychologist James Reason in his book devoted to this theme, is a large subject. You can say that again! And so is stupidity, at least to judge by the more than 500 closely printed pages of Walter B. Pitkin’s A Short Introduction to the History of Human Stupidity, at the end of ...

A friend of mine is kind enough to send me little signs of the times that he finds scattered everywhere. His most recent offering is a photograph of enormously fat people, clutching preternaturally vast containers of sugary drinks, wearing masks to “keep safe” (as the modern cant phrase has ...

The Russian writer V.G. Korolenko (a kind of sub-Chekhov) once wrote that Man is made for happiness as a bird for flight: To which I can only say that this has not been my observation, or even experience, of life. If Man is made for happiness, then warthogs are made to win Miss World. In my fairly ...

How does a modern democracy reconcile populist currents with woke liberalism? How does it satisfy both those who think that the state is too lenient toward criminals and those who see criminals as themselves the victims of social injustice? The British criminal justice system has found a solution ...

I wish I loved the Human Race; I wish I loved its silly face; I wish I liked the way it talks; I wish I liked the way it walks... —Sir Walter Raleigh (1861–1922) During the Second World War, there was a poster in British stations that asked passengers whether their journey was really necessary, ...

We live in an age of serial expertise. First we were experts in climate change, whether or not we believed it was taking place, and consequently in energy policy. Then, with Covid, we became expert epidemiologists, though most of us would shortly before have been hard put to explain what ...

“It is a beautiful spring day,” wrote my grandfather to my mother, “and the sun is shining brightly, but there is no sun bright enough to penetrate the dark clouds that are covering the whole earth.”  He might have been writing about the ...