It is a humbling tribute to my complete unimportance that, having written perhaps 5,000 articles in my lifetime, I have only once been the object of concerted attack or criticism. This is especially humbling in the era of the social media, when it is so easy to insult people publicly. The one ...

It was the late Marshal Mobutu’s great economic insight that bribery was a transaction involving two parties. Whether it is more blessed to give than to receive I cannot say, because it depends on the circumstances. In over-regulated states it certainly cuts through a lot of red tape and thereby ...

It has been very hot in my part of France lately. Not far away, the temperature in the shade has been as much as 45 degrees centigrade (113 Fahrenheit). No doubt it is often hotter in the Empty Quarter of Arabia or in the Mojave Desert, but for us poor Northern Europeans it seems pretty brutal. ...

On a recent train journey from Paris to Nîmes, which took about three hours, I was unfortunate enough to sit across from a real plouc. Plouc is a wonderfully expressive word in French, almost onomatopoeic, for a nincompoop of a certain kind, an unsophisticated provincial bore, not malicious but ...

I justifiably criticize and reprehend, but you hate. I have well-thought-out, rational opinions, but you have mere prejudices. I hate hatred. I hate those who hate, especially those who hate the wrong things, that is to say the things that I do not hate. Such people are hateful. It is a pleasure ...

I happened to be in Paris when the final of the women’s World Cup (soccer) was played. Our little local restaurant, owned and run by Berbers, had a screen that relayed it, more or less inescapably, to the customers. I am afraid that I was prey to very uncharitable and incorrect thoughts. The ...

Pedants delight in error, not in truth, and fall upon it like scavengers on a carcass. I have books, pre-owned—or even pre-loved, as dealers in secondhand objects are now inclined to call them—in which pedants have underlined or scored out words containing misprints, as if the search for such ...

Starting from absolute freedom, I arrive at absolute tyranny. —Dostoyevsky, The Devils The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates, but users of social media are increasingly discovering that the too-closely examined life is not worth living either; or at least, others try to make it ...

Chekhov says somewhere—I think it must be in one of his letters to young ladies with literary ambitions—that a writer can, or at least should be able to, write a story about an ashtray. Actually, this might be less difficult than might at first appear. If you imagine an ashtray to have eyes, ...

I am an admirer of ratcatchers; in my experience, they respect their enemies and love their work. I have never met a bored ratcatcher, or one who gave the impression that he wished he was doing something else. They are always knowledgeable in the ways of the Rat, and since the Rat is cunning, they ...