In a supermarket in France recently, I noticed that the young woman at the till wore a badge designating her as an hôtesse de caisse—a till hostess. Not long before, she had been but a humble caissière, a cashier. What a promotion! She didn’t look all that proud of it, I must say. Deliberate ...

Attentively watching the grass grow in the meadow in front of my house, which is my major contribution to gardening, I saw two dogs approach. They were obviously companions, for they were trotting side by side contentedly. I hoped that they would come to me, and they did. They were both mongrels; ...

My taste in films is strange, at least in the statistical sense. I don’t like romance, I don’t like happy endings (they depress me), and I don’t like gratuitous or unrealistic violence. I like films that are serious, even when they are funny. I went recently with some friends in Paris to see ...

I noticed a very pretty girl sitting not far from me on a bus ride of about 45 minutes last week. Soon after the bus departed, she took out her makeup and spent about thirty minutes making herself up. No great artist could have taken more trouble over his canvas than did she over her face. Her ...

“There is no art,” says King Duncan in Macbeth, “to find the mind’s construction in the face.” In other words, one cannot tell a person from his face. Well, one has to remember that not everything that Shakespeare put in the mouths of his characters is true. Shakespeare, being of protean ...

No doubt it is evidence of my dissociation from much of modern life, but until the recent libel trials I did not really know who Johnny Depp was and had never heard of Amber Heard. I did not know what they did for a living, though I had seen pictures of Depp in a number of advertisements. I found ...

One of the confusions of the age is the conflation of what is desirable with what is a right. For example, it is clearly desirable that everybody should be housed decently: No one wants to see anyone homeless who does not desire to be, or to live in horrible conditions. But that is not the same as ...

Sometimes I think that the world has gone mad, but then I remember that, perhaps, it has always been going mad. Did not Thomas Middleton title his play It’s a Mad World, My Masters more than four centuries ago? Then I reflect that this time, however, it’s true, the world really has gone ...

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 ...