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 ...

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, ...