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 ...

Never has the contrast between the scale of world events and my own little personal concerns been so great. While millions flee bombardment, and the world economy faces implosion, with all the hardship that such an implosion will inevitably bring in its wake, I do my exercises, twice ...

It is not often that the title of an article in the Guardian newspaper makes me laugh because of its absurdity, but I laughed when I read the following: People struggle to understand grief, but it is a byproduct of love. The article of which this was the title was ...