There are several public figures from whose faces I feel compelled to avert my gaze, so irritating do I find them, among which are those of Messrs. Blair of Britain and Trudeau of Canada, La Compasionaria of New Zealand Jacinda Adern, and the Scottish nationalist leader Nicola Sturgeon, whose ...

Joy at the misfortunes of others is no doubt an ineradicable part of Man’s bad character, and I doubt whether there is a person alive who has never experienced it. Generally speaking, however, most of us retain enough decency, or enough desire to appear decent in the eyes of others, not to ...

In the days when there was still capital punishment in Britain, the prison doctor had to certify a man fit for execution before he could be hanged. What fitness for execution consisted of, I am uncertain: It was a concept that was inadequately taught in medical school. Presumably fitness for ...

During a visit of the Spanish prime minister to Mexico, the president of that country wanted Spain to apologize for the abuses committed half a millennium ago by the conquistadores. This made about as much sense as the British prime minister asking Italy to apologize for the Roman conquest, or for ...

How is it that one recognizes one’s mistakes only after one has made them? The other day I was mortified to spot a gross grammatical error in an article that I had just published in a literary journal. To me it stood out from the page as if in neon lighting, and I felt depressed about it for the ...

I suppose that if I had to select a single figure as the preeminent intellectual influence of our time, it would have to be Marie Antoinette. She, you remember, played at being milkmaid or shepherdess while actually she was Queen of France. She had at least the excuse that being Queen of France was ...

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 ...