From time to time I would meet the late Professor Michael Shepherd for a drink. He was a most distinguished researcher in the psychiatric field, and he was formidably erudite. He also had a satirical sense of humor, laughing at the world’s absurdity. Once, for example, tired of cliché and ...

The key to a successful career in any modern bureaucracy, it seems to me, is the mastery of and willingness to use a certain kind of language that is opaque and almost meaningless to an outsider. The mastery requires dedication, and the willingness a lack of scruple. It demands a certain ...

Last week I was invited by internet to sign a petition asking the British prime minister, Mrs. May, not to snatch free milk from the mouths of British children under the age of 5. The full machinery of outraged sentimentality is being geared into operation. What here does the word “snatch” ...

We flatter ourselves that our lives are as continuous and coherent as a film, and that we can display any part of it on our inner cinema screen whenever we like simply by pressing the rewind button in our mind. This is not so, or at least not so in my case. I am very far indeed from the man studied ...

Henceforth, apparently, the major theaters of Dublin are, as a matter of principle, to commission at least half their new plays from women. At least half of the characters in the plays, and the directors too, will be women. One can only applaud this commitment to equality and social inclusion. ...

This year is the bicentenary of the birth of Karl Marx, and on the whole the commentary that it has evoked has obeyed the injunction not to speak ill of the dead, as if the passage of time and the deaths of millions in the name of the birthday boy did not somewhat attenuate the social imperative to ...

The cover of this week’s British Medical Journal is emblazoned with the words “Sex workers risk prosecution under UK law if they carry more than six condoms.” The words “six condoms” are emphasized by a change of color of lettering from blue to green. Then the cover asks, “Would ...

The ambition of a friend of my wife’s is to die with her house tidy. I have a similar ambition in respect of my study. I want to die with my books and papers ranged in what in the prison in which I worked as a doctor was called Good Order and Discipline, GOAD for short (ours is the golden age of ...

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 ...