I was in Hungary last week, so I thought that I should read Memoir of Hungary by Sándor Márai. Márai was a tragic figure. He was a novelist who wrote in his native Hungarian (though he was fluent in German), which severely limited his audience until after his death, translators from Hungarian ...

I read The Guardian and The New York Times as a fat man jogs: I think it will do me good. Most of us read to confirm our prejudices, and so it is a good exercise to read what one will probably disagree with. How can one argue unless one knows with whom or with what one is arguing? I opened my ...

There are lies, damned lies and statistics, said Disraeli; and I doubt that any of us have never misused a statistic in the course of a discussion, either wittingly or unwittingly. Most people are apt to take correlation for causation, and if I say that people of high intelligence are apt to have ...

Reason being the slave of the passions, as Hume tells us, no man can be rational and nothing but rational; but, what is less often noticed, no man can be entirely irrational, either. It is reason that allows us to connect our actions with our ends, and in that sense no one acts completely ...

I haven’t had a television for more than fifty years, and though some people tell me that I have missed much of value thereby, which I do not doubt because it would hardly be possible to produce so many tens of thousands (or is it millions?) of hours of television without producing at least ...

There are few quiet pleasures greater than that of contemplating future catastrophe. Fortunately, we are spoiled for choice; if it isn’t the return of the Spanish flu, it’s the melting of the Himalayan glaciers or the complete collapse of the world financial system. The latter is my favorite: ...

Other than sheer hatred, resentment is by far the strongest and most important of political emotions, compared with which mere benevolence is feeble indeed. Resentment can (and often does) last a lifetime, and it has the enormous psychological benefit of persuading him who feels it that nothing of ...

The minor inconveniences of life often cause disproportionate despair, at least if my reaction to them is anything to go by. Is life worth living, one wonders, when there is no parking space and one has to search for half an hour merely to be able to get out of one’s car? The other day I woke ...

When I reached maturity, or at any rate stopped growing, I was of average height. Now I am below average height, the world having grown taller than I in the meantime. In the same way, I used to be averagely egocentric or narcissistic, being neither entirely self-obsessed nor completely selfless ...

The pedant seeks error, not truth, and delights to find it. Indeed, the search for error may be the entire purpose of his reading, to judge from certain books dating from the 19th century in my possession. In them, the sole mark made by a previous reader is the emphatic underlining, often ...