It is 55 years since my friend, M.….. D……, died. I was 16, he was a few months older. He had suffered all his life from terrible asthma, which had deformed his chest. At the time the most effective relief from acute exacerbations, which he experienced very frequently, was provided by ...

Thanks to my pessimism, I am generally quite cheerful (it is optimists who, because of their illusions, are most prey to misery). I do not expect that all the difficulties of life will suddenly be resolved, and am not even sure that, if they were, life would not become intolerable. Man, after all, ...

In the days of my childhood, there was a peculiar annual cricket match called Gentlemen vs. Players. The Gentlemen were cricketers who played at the highest level but who were unpaid for doing so, they being well-born and having an income from elsewhere; the Players were professionals of the ...

Sometimes I think of football (soccer), though I have no interest in it. This is because it obtrudes itself on me and is of great cultural significance. I once worked it out that so-called serious British newspapers devote more space to it than to any other matter, whether it be a political crisis, ...

The mice in my absence have been at my books again, with what Marx called, with regard to the manuscript of his then-unpublished Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, their gnawing criticism. Much good may gnawing it have done them! When finally published, forty years after ...

On Christmas Day I sat by the fire in my house in France and read a charming little book, Tea With Walter de la Mare, by Russell Brain, published in 1957. Walter de la Mare, who died age 83 in 1956, was a poet, novelist, and short-story writer who was once very famous and popular, but of whom I ...

Most of the time that I have spent informing myself about the world we live in, with only partial success, has been wasted, at least as far as practical effect is concerned. During the Cold War I read a lot about Marxism; then came Islam and Islamism; now it is COVID-19. My influence on world ...

I have never really understood the passion for hunting. Whenever I see an animal or a bird in the wild, it does not cross my mind to kill it. I have even been charged by an elephant without wishing that I could shoot it: I wished it only to go away. I acknowledge, of course, that the passion for ...

By choosing a black actress to play the part of Anne Boleyn on a television series about the life of Henry VIII, the production company has, no doubt unwittingly, demonstrated how deeply entrenched racist attitudes are in Britain. The company is also bullying its audience in the name of its own ...

Armed with the necessary certificate to justify my journey from France to the Netherlands, my presence in the latter country having become “indispensable,” I spent a couple of days in Amsterdam. The regulations there were slightly different from those in France; for example, the shops were open ...