For the last few nights, before I go to sleep and when I wake up, I have watched the flies on the ceiling of my bedroom. There are about six or seven of them; there used to be far more, hundreds in fact, which I used to remove twice a day by means of a vacuum cleaner. I am ashamed to say that I ...

To mark the centenary of the birth of Norman Mailer—which I shall not be celebrating wildly—a publisher decided to reissue a volume of his essays. An employee of the publisher’s objected to the inclusion of the essay “The White Negro,” and the publisher decided not to include it. Not ...

As I write this, Germany is closing down its nuclear power stations, and I am reminded of a phrase in Shostakovich’s memoirs, including of life under Stalin: “A great cultural event, like the closing of a theatre.” There are those who see behind the closure a sinister Russian plot, Mrs. ...

What is it to grow old, asked Matthew Arnold as the first line of his poem “Growing Old,” which he published in 1867 when he himself was 45, a greater age then than now, perhaps, but still not very ancient. His answer was not comforting: He specifically rejected the notion that growing old ...

People, it seems, are increasingly unable to bear the presence in a room of someone who is of different political opinion from theirs. We have now become adept at gauging the general tenor of any gathering’s views and either join in if those views coincide with our own or hold our silence if they ...

Most people can imagine circumstances in which they would rather die than continue to live. For many in certain jurisdictions it must be a comfort to know that, thanks to the legalization of assisted suicide, they can end their lives with relative ease and in circumstances of their own choosing, ...

On two successive days, I traveled on the London Underground and the Paris Métro. One contrast between the passengers struck me very forcibly. On the London Underground, not more than 5 percent of the passengers wore face masks. On the Paris Métro, not more than 1 percent did not. The contrast ...

Recently I spent a couple of days in Dubai-on-Thames, formerly known as London. The south bank of the river has been transformed by glass and steel buildings, second-rate even by the exacting standards of second-rateness of, say, a Mies van der Rohe. They look as if they are built to last a couple ...

The British government has managed to spend approximately $50 billion on a system for testing and tracing cases of COVID-19. So far, the average citizen has been tested five times. Yet mysteriously, the British mortality rate is either above, or very similar to, that of countries that have tested ...

“No worst, there is none,” wrote the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, about human states of mind. If he were alive today, he might write, “No most absurd, there is none,” about our current contortions of language. In a publication aimed at dermatologists, the Dermatology Times, we read in an ...