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 ...

When I was a boy, there were men, mainly quite old and apparently with nothing else to do, who walked up and down the prominent streets of towns and cities with sandwich boards announcing the imminent end of the world. They looked pretty pleased about it, too, as if they were in possession of a ...

My bank is large and I am small: Perhaps that is why it feels entitled to write to me so impertinently. I received a letter from it the other day with the heading “Some of your account information needs updating.” My account information does not need anything; it is not the kind of entity ...

The continued thoughtless use of the word person continues to puzzle me. Who was the Per whose son gave his name to every member of our species on the planet? Per is a well-known first name of Scandinavian men: Is it claimed, therefore, that we are all descended from a Scandinavian man? Is it not ...

Nearly three quarters of a century after his death, Hitler’s shadow continues to fall across Europe. Any dissent from any modern orthodoxy, no matter how silly, soon meets with the argumentum ad Hitlerum, to the effect that something or other is the beginning of the slippery slope to Auschwitz. ...

We live, as perhaps we always have lived, in curious times. On the one hand, we have never been as sensitive to what people say as we are today; we have no emotional skins, as it were, but only emotional raw nerve endings, so that the innocuous appears to us as corrosive as acid. On the other hand, ...