A few years ago, I had the bright idea of writing a book about arsenic in the 19th century. In preparation for writing it, I bought scores of books on this fascinating subject, including a very rare bound collection of arsenical wallpapers used in America. I had until then idly supposed that all ...

An old friend of mine who once ran a small publishing house told me that a swastika on the cover of a book increased its sales by 30 percent, irrespective of the book’s subject matter. Thus, if Tax Law for Philatelists would otherwise have sold ten copies, it would sell thirteen with a swastika ...

Sometimes a tiny episode or gesture reveals a lot about the world in which we live. Such an episode was the press conference given recently by the famous Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, in which he removed the bottle of Coca-Cola from the desk in front of him and replaced it with a bottle ...

About a quarter of a century ago—how lightly that phrase now trips off my tongue!—I was de facto vulgarity correspondent for a British newspaper that, on the question of vulgarity, faced in more than one direction. It would thunder on one page against the moral degeneration of which modern ...

Of late, I have taken a walk almost every day in the cemetery of Père Lachaise, which is near my flat in Paris. It is said that 3 million people are interred in the cemetery, and so, in a sense, it fulfills the advertising slogan of the News of the World, the British Sunday tabloid that brought ...

I have tried all my life to understand my fellow humans but have failed. If I understood them better, perhaps I would share more of their interests. Take reality TV, for example. Returning to France recently, I discovered by chance that a family called the Gayats had become famous. For what, ...

When the restaurants in our little town reopened after several months of forced closure, I thought there would be a mad rush to get into them. Nothing of the sort—and so much for my powers of prediction (which I have noticed before are not very great). The restaurants were almost empty. Of ...

As everyone knows, or by now ought to know, the only possible explanation of differing outcomes between groups is prejudice, privilege, and oppression by those groups with more favorable outcomes. It follows that the only solution to the anomaly of differential outcomes, and the restoration of the ...

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 ...