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 ...

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 ...