I returned recently to my house in France for a brief break. The weather was of the best—a cloudless sunny sky, warm and dry. It was almost perfect, but there was a fly in the ointment, the fly in the ointment being the flies in our bedroom, hundreds of them. Why they should have gathered there I ...

Life is full of irritations, major and minor. One of the minor irritations is the activity of the Sock Fairy, the sprite who seems to inhabit all washing machines, at least all that I have ever owned. However careful I am to put only matched pairs into the machine, the Sock Fairy plays havoc with ...

Some time ago, I was asked to review a vast biography of Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright and poet, by an admirer of his work. It is seldom that one reads hundreds of pages about someone without coming across a single instance of a decent, kind, or selfless act, but so it was with Brecht. He ...

The Irish Post Office has issued a stamp to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Ernesto Guevara. This is, presumably, because he was both very famous and had some distant Irish ancestry. It is, however, a rather sinister philosophy that the worth of a man’s work or ideas, or his ...

I arrived at my house in France recently to find the roses eaten by deer and a drystone wall damaged by wild boar in their eagerness to get at the hollyhocks. One of the bedrooms, moreover, smelled of mice. Is nothing sacred to Nature? This year we had already had a plague of moths whose ...

There is nothing so odd, bizarre, and sometimes disgusting as other people’s customs. To adapt and paraphrase Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady with regard to women, why can’t other people be more like us? After all, we are perfectly well-intentioned as well as rational beings; from which it ...

It is a strange life, and none stranger than in the Gulf—the Persian Gulf, I mean, not that of Mexico, or even that of Carpentaria—where I have spent the past week. For obvious climatic reasons, it is an air-conditioned life: You go from the air-conditioned aircraft to the air-conditioned ...

Recently I made reference to the criticism Simon Leys made of a book by Maria-Antonietta Macchiocchi. He said that the most charitable interpretation that could be put on it was that it was the product of stupidity; any other interpretation must involve outright fraud on the part of the authoress. ...

When I was asked to name the contemporary writer whom I most admired, I used without hesitation to say—until he died in 2014—Pierre Ryckmans, better known as Simon Leys. Leys was a Belgian who lived more than half his life in Australia. He was a Sinologist, art historian, novelist, literary ...

Mail-order catalogs (except of antiquarian books) are not my favorite reading, and yet we can learn something from them, even from those that hold no other interest for us. For example, the other day I looked into such a catalog at my mother-in-law’s—if there is some reading matter lying about ...