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, ...

According to a Gallup poll, the percentage of the American population that now “identifies” as LGBTQ+ has doubled by comparison with ten years ago, and now stands at 7.1 percent. Among the youngest cohort polled, it was over 20 percent. There is no more weaselly expression in the modern ...

Every month when I am in England, I have lunch with an old friend in a restaurant about equidistant from our two homes, that is to say about fifty miles from each. The food is good, but I have a secret and rather peculiar additional reason for liking the restaurant. I like its men’s ...

In the preface to the second edition of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley said that anyone who wanted to establish a modern dictatorship would be advised to allow the population complete sexual freedom and freedom to take drugs, leaving everything else to the control of the dictatorship. In my ...

The only written words of mine that have ever had a practical effect on the world appeared in my review of Alexander McCall Smith’s book The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Mine was the first review in the national press, and I like to think that it paid some small part in catapulting this, and ...

Some people come to hate what their profession suggests that they should love: Many librarians hate books, for example, at least if their way of treating them is any indication. Not a few would like to dispense with books altogether, replacing them by computer terminals so that they no longer have ...

My wife and I lingered too long over lunch and missed our train from Nîmes to Paris; not by very much, not by more than thirty seconds in fact, but here really was an illustration of that old saw, that a miss is as good as a mile. How all occasions did inform against us! There were traffic jams, ...

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 ...