There is a gesture that I have detested ever since an Albanian policeman made it in my direction about thirty years ago. He placed the palm of his right hand over his heart and made a slight bowing movement toward me. The reason I detested it was that he had clouted me with his truncheon shortly ...

There is a lot of misery in the world, it would be useless to deny it. The description of the world as a vale of tears surely conveys something to every one of us. And yet, all things considered, it could be worse, even much worse, at least for very large numbers of people. I think that ...

Patricia MacCormack is a professor of continental philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, which has nearly 40,000 students. If the photographs and videos of her to be found on the internet are truly of her, she looks as if she had strayed from the set of a cheap horror movie, ...

I have been in quarantine for the past nine days since my arrival in England from France. I am not sure whether this was a public health or a punitive measure, but if the latter, it certainly failed of its effect: I adore being in quarantine. In the first place, it gives me a good excuse for my ...

Recently I have been dreaming a lot, unpleasant dreams but not nightmares. What this means, or even if it means anything at all, I don’t know. Perhaps it is a cerebral form of indigestion. I have never gone in much for Freud’s dream symbolism, the so-called royal road to the unconscious, but ...

Mrs. Clinton, who knows a thing or two about phoniness, praised Meghan Markle’s decision to speak of her “mental health” before tens of millions of her very closest counselors. Mrs. Clinton said it was brave of her, but brave was not the word for it; exhibitionist would have been better, ...

A few weeks ago, I saw my first lizard of spring—except, of course, that it was still January, which is to say winter. The weather, however, was unseasonably warm, and I suppose nowadays many people might have considered this a harbinger of the end of the world, but which I was selfish enough to ...

It is difficult to tell the difference these days between what is the serious and the spoof. For example, I came across this recently, an article in the student magazine of University College, London: The benefits of a good cry are manifold: it detoxifies the body, helps self-sooth, dulls pain, ...

One of the few benefits of the continuing restrictions imposed on us during the seemingly endless pandemic now afflicting most of the world is that they have forced us to live more on our inner resources—if we have any, that is. Of course, what counts as an inner resource could be a matter of ...

In a recent article, I mentioned the death of my friend, M…… D……, when I was 16 and he was but a few months older than I. He has been present in my mind more than usual for two reasons. The first, more or less respectable, is that, as one grows older, one lives ever more willingly in the ...