Everyone knows, or thinks he knows, the dangers of nationalism and its practical corollary, the nation-state. The dangers are foreign wars of conquest, xenophobia, irredentism, and the oppression, not to say massacre, of minorities within their borders. The supposed solution to these dangers (which ...

Whatever else may be said about Marxism, it provided (for those who needed it) an eschatological philosophy in a post-religious world. It served more than one psychological purpose: It gave those who adhered to it the comforting feeling that they understood the inner or hidden workings of the ...

The first writer of supposedly classic status whom I ever read was W.W. Jacobs. He is not accorded that status now, and indeed is very largely forgotten (a warning to all writers complacent in their success). At about the age of 10, I read—or was made to read—his short story, the one by which, ...

There have long been complaints about crime—the quality of it, I mean, not the quantity. It seems so sordid and ordinary these days by comparison with the past. The passage of time covers murder, especially, with a patina of romance and even, in some cases, with humor. Events terrible and ...

One cannot blame anyone for having failed to do the impossible, but the fact is, roughly speaking, the science (or study) of psychology has added nothing whatever to human self-understanding, at any rate over and above that which is available from literature and honest self-examination, the latter ...

I have too much respect for music to sing myself, as my voice is such that it makes the average crow sound like Fischer-Dieskau. It is not that I am tone-deaf; on the contrary, I am appalled by the tuneless croaking sound I make when forced to try. Many a time when asked in remote places to sing a ...

I would make a very bad bodyguard—not that it has ever been my ambition to be one. I would be useless not merely because I am incapable of fighting, but because I am not suspicious (and therefore vigilant) enough. Notwithstanding a cynical view of the world, I am generally trusting of the ...

Of recent months, several children of friends of mine have asked my help in preparing what they call a personal statement in their application for a job or place at university. Why they should ask me to help them is a bit of a mystery; I am glad to say that I made my career, such as it was, before ...

I have met Tariq Ramadan only once in my life and was very impressed by him—impressed unfavorably, that is. He seemed to me then the Jimmy Swaggart of Islamism, or at least the kind of man from whom one would certainly not buy a secondhand car. He had the affability of a carpet salesman in a ...

Last week I stayed in a part of London on the border between a rich and a poor part of the city: on one side houses costing millions, on the other side social housing for the city’s hewers of wood and drawers of water, or at least drawers of social security. There was a certain exhilaration in ...