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 ...
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 ...
