It is said that Ivan the Terrible ordered that the principal architect of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow should have his eyes put out so that he could never again build anything as beautiful. Whether or not this story is apocryphal (fake news being nothing new), the architect who built the ...

One of the most curious French verbs known to me, at least as used by journalists in the context of economics, is débloquer, to unblock or release. Thus the French government is universally reported to have promised to unblock or release 10 billion euros in order to increase the purchasing power ...

For reasons too convoluted for swift explanation, I looked into the annual Scottish figures for homicide recently. Last year they were down 5 percent and were the second-lowest recorded since 1976. The homicide rate has declined from its peak rate of 2.2 to 1.1 homicides per hundred thousand ...

A young British woman called Grace Millane was making her way round the world after graduation from university when she was murdered in New Zealand. A 26-year-old man has been arrested and charged with the crime. I hope I do not have to explain that this was a horrible crime. Indeed, if someone ...

I seldom give advice, the taste of others being so very different from my own, but I strongly advise anyone who is in London before Feb. 24 to visit the British Museum’s wonderful exhibition I Am Ashurbanipal: King of the World, King of Assyria. If your imagination is not stirred by it I will do ...

There was once a medical student of my acquaintance who consistently scored lower marks on multiple-choice examination papers than could have been expected by chance, which I suppose implied knowledge of a kind, albeit of a mirror-image kind. He was infallibly capable of grasping the wrong end of ...

Supermarkets are undoubtedly convenient, but convenience and a large choice of cheap comestibles is far from being the highest human good. Supermarkets destroy the small commerce of towns, which is essential to their social life. I try not to use them, but like everyone else I resort to them ...

With that almost infallible instinct for making the wrong decision possessed by the British government, headed by nullity-made-flesh Theresa May, Britain has refused the request of Asia Bibi for asylum. If ever there were a person who needed and deserved asylum, it was she. Having spent eight years ...

Like practically everyone else, I look at my phone or turn on my computer as soon as I wake to find out what has happened in the world in my temporary absence from it. You can always tell that nothing much has happened when the headlines are something like (as they were this morning) “Number of ...

For a number of years I have been fighting a lonely one-man (or should I say one-person?) battle against self-esteem—not my own, of course, because I have just the right amount, but as the master key to human happiness. Of the many possible human qualities, self-esteem, far from being ...