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 ...

Freud said that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious—provided, of course, that the traffic was directed by him. His work has always seemed to me more like soothsaying than science, which perhaps explains its popularity in the 20th century, with its need for pagan mystics masquerading as ...

My best books are the ones I haven’t written. They are not yet even in the larval stage, but I know them to be profound and original in content and perfect in form. I am very proud of them, and the mere thought of them gives a spring to my step. They are a justification for my having lived. It is ...

I hesitate, in this vale of tears, to bring before the public, however small it might be, my own personal travails, but at least I can claim to be an expert on them, insofar as I experience them myself. Many writers are expert on nothing else but their experience of their own irritations with ...

I hesitate, in this vale of tears, to bring before the public, however small it might be, my own personal travails, but at least I can claim to be an expert on them, insofar as I experience them myself. Many writers are expert on nothing else but their experience of their own irritations with ...

I can never quite make up my mind whether politics is important or unimportant to me. I have only to read the latest headline to feel either a surge of rage or despair, moderated by a brief burst of bitter laughter. Is reality satire, or satire reality? It is difficult to say these days. I used ...

Mr. McDonnell, deputy leader of the British Labour Party, which for the time being is in opposition, recently objected to the presence of hereditary peers in the "€œupper"€ house of Britain's Parliament, using the crude and vulgar language typical of populist politicians anxious to demonstrate ...

Not many people, I imagine, still read Dr. Johnson for pleasure or instruction, though he was once the favorite reading of the educated in the English-speaking world and his complete works found in practically all private libraries. He contrived to be a moralist without moralizing; he was an ...

A young man of my acquaintance recently ended his intimate relationship with a girl that had lasted some years, and announced the fact to the world on Facebook, together with some rather disobliging commentary on his former lover's character. This mania for making public what ought to remain ...