We have had an outbreak of golden orioles at my house in France. There are, of course, far worse outbreaks to have, but it is a little frustrating that these beautiful birds (the male especially, the female is less beautiful) should be so shy and difficult to catch sight of. They hide in the tops ...

The best argument against democracy, said Winston Churchill, is a five-minute conversation with an elector. Of course, we are not the type of elector to whom Churchill was referring, that is to say the averagely ignorant, ill-informed, or foolish elector; nor are we prey to the foolish passions ...

Perhaps I am a little paranoid, but I feel that I am often, and increasingly, under moral siege by small coteries of people who believe themselves to be so well-meaning that anyone who differs from them must be a moral defective. A prime example of moral bullying is the Paralympics that have just ...

There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face, says Shakespeare—or rather, says Duncan in Macbeth, since of no author is it more difficult than Shakespeare to know what his own opinion of any question was, so capable was he of entering every type of person’s mind as if it were ...

Last week, I saw a picture of President Macron in his shirtsleeves embracing Teddy Riner, the French heavyweight judo champion who has long reigned unbeaten in every championship he has entered, and who has just won yet another Olympic medal. M. Macron is not a large man, which is not his fault, ...

Is it not curious how we infuse the natural world with meaning and purpose? We think of the cuckoo and the rattlesnake as bad, but the giant panda as good. Even the sternest evolutionists often resort to language that suggests Evolution as some kind of god: Evolution decided this, or Evolution ...

Men are to be allowed to box against women at the Olympic Games. Admittedly, they will have been men who have undergone—subjected themselves to—certain changes, surgical and hormonal, and are therefore different from average men, but still they are men and in fact cannot be made into women. ...

A straw poll of taxi drivers in Paris that I conducted in the run-up to the Olympics suggested less than enthusiasm for them. While such straw polls may not even be representative of taxi drivers, let alone of the population as a whole, this is a method employed by many journalists and is often as ...

Electoral politics, particularly in Western Europe, is a toxic amalgam of power-madness, low cunning, and moral grandiosity. Of these, as St. Paul said of charity, moral grandiosity is the greatest: that is to say, not the best or most important in this particular context, but the most harmful. I ...

What you deem to have been recent depends very much on your age. What is recent to an old man is prehistory to the young. To me, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe seems but yesterday, though I have to admit that there are people now, even professors, for whom that downfall, and what ...