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 ...

No doubt it is a sign of advancing age, and also of retirement, that these days I always take a siesta. This increases my productivity greatly, for I am energetically clearheaded only for an hour at a time, and always soon after I have fully woken up. After about an hour, it is downhill all the ...

Recently two Parisian taxi drivers of African origin have told me that they wished to return to Africa, and had concrete plans actually to do so. Several of their friends had similar plans. I asked them why, and their answer surprised me. “To be free,” they said. Back to Africa from Europe for ...