Returning to England from France recently, I was immediately placed under quarantine, or house arrest, for two weeks, as if I harbored a dangerous contagion. I did not mind this much, for two reasons: the first being that, as I live almost in quarantine anyway, my life having been more or less ...

The selfie is perhaps the defining cultural artifact of our time. Me and the Mona Lisa, Me and the Pyramids, Me and the Colosseum, with the emphasis on the Me, of course; at least COVID-19 has put paid to all that for a time, as well as to little Greta’s public harangues, which somehow manage to ...

Now that academics have abandoned BC (Before Christ) for BCE (Before the Common Era), though without explaining for whom or to what the Era is Common, the initials BC are available again for use, and I should suggest that they be taken to stand for Before COVID. After all, the virus, or our ...

Between a hollyhock and a lavender in my garden is suspended a spider’s web. There is a part in which the prey is caught, and another part, a funnel, in which the spider waits like a paparazzo awaiting the appearance of a celebrity emerging from a night spent with a person who is not his or her ...

It is a confession of essential frivolity of mind, perhaps, to admit that my favorite reading is in the annals of crime. Of course, as a former prison doctor and expert witness in murder trials, I can claim a legitimate professional interest, but to do so would not be altogether honest. Like 99 ...

There comes a time in life when one is more interested in the past than in the future. In my case, I reached it very early: I cannot remember a time when the past was not more alluring to me than the future as a subject of thought and reflection. The past is much richer than the future, whose ...

Most people, I suppose, would be pleased by the death of a rat that lived near their house, but this is probably because they are much more likely to see a rat already dead than a rat actually dying. In fact, until today, I had never seen a rat dying of the rat poison put down every six months by ...

Until today, I was not aware that there was an academic subject known as Fat Studies. You can take Fat Studies at several universities, and it will probably come as no surprise to readers to learn that they are fully compatible with the main aim of modern education, namely the promotion of a sense ...

A friend of my wife’s wants to tidy her house before she dies. As she has not done so for forty years so far, it is unlikely that she will succeed. In like fashion, I want to catalog my books before I die, but I have about as much chance of succeeding. I am an accumulator rather than a collector ...

There is no proposal so foolish that it has no advocates, or sometimes even its fanatics. If hope springs eternal in the human breast, delusion springs eternal from the human head. Recently I was scrolling through The Guardian looking for easy targets—The Guardian is an inexhaustible source of ...