Intellectuals are often shortsighted, failing to see what is before their very nose. Their object is to obscure the obvious and to make complex the simple, so that they are then needed to lead humanity away from its ignorance and stupidity. With the inexorable rise of tertiary education, we have ...

We are enjoined to say nothing ill of the dead—the recently dead, that is, guidance being somewhat less clear as to when denigration of the dear departed may with decency begin. On the whole I agree that death should result in a moratorium on backbiting and other popular forms of character ...

When it comes to murder, I am not a utilitarian; that is to say, I am against it even when the victim is an undesirable character and the world would be a slightly better place without him. I have noticed, however, that these days there is a tendency, at least in the British press, to canonize ...

Concerts by a singer called Bertrand Cantat in Paris were canceled recently because the organizers said they could not guarantee the maintenance of public order at them. Whether this was a pretext will never be known, though it is certainly true that these days people who feel strongly about ...

In Chekhov’s The Seagull, there is a character called Trigorin. He is a writer (a good writer, he thinks his epitaph will say, but not as good as Turgenev) who has always a little notebook with him to take down the interesting things that people say, or anything else that catches his fancy. I ...

This is a story with a happy ending. I was driving through France with my wife when suddenly the thought occurred to me that I did not know where my passport was. I do not know how or why it suddenly came into my head, but it did. We do not need Freud to tell us that not all mentation is ...

When Eliza Doolittle said “Not bloody likely” at the first performance in 1913 of Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, she created a sensation. Never before had such a word been used on the respectable stage; it was the beginning of a long process of verbal liberation of which we now enjoy the ...

I think it was Jean Améry who said that once you have been tortured you remain tortured. I do not mean to claim any kind of equivalence in the experience, but once you have been to North Korea, you never forget it, either—as, for example, you might forget whether or not you have ever been to ...

There is compulsory entertainment almost everywhere these days, even in public lavatories. It shadows you like a secret policeman. I would dislike this even if I had not reached the age when urination required some concentration for successful accomplishment or completion; rock music while I try ...

Race is a subject about which we all feel slightly nervous these days, because whatever attitude you take to it, someone will call you a racist, an accusation from which no plea of innocence is allowed or believed. This is because it is almost impossible to be consistent about it; and it is why, in ...