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 ...

I love a good cemetery, and cemeteries do not come much better than the one in Highgate in London, which I visited recently while staying nearby. It is romantically unkempt and overgrown: A tomb that is sacred to the memory of someone has ivy growing over it as if deliberately pointing to ...

There are no sheep more ovine than those who get themselves tattooed in order to individuate themselves. Judging by the statistics, such sheeplike behavior is becoming more and more common. I still remember the good old days when tattooing was largely, if not entirely, confined to soldiers, ...