In my salad days as vulgarity correspondent"that is to say, a reporter on the disgusting ways in which young British people so often chose to behave"I was sent one year to the Glastonbury Festival. This is a large gathering of the British lumpenintelligentsia come to celebrate its own ...
I have long admired taxi drivers. They are often well-informed and have a clear-eyed view of human nature that is neither cynical nor sentimental. In the days when there were such people as foreign correspondents, many a taxi driver's opinion of the situation in his country found its way into the ...
I hesitate to show myself in a good light"it seems so much more honest, somehow, to confess to being a complete swine"but the other day I did something that was comparatively good, morally speaking. I feel rather proud of it, in fact, a pride that is no doubt a sin in itself: By having done ...
There is no better or more salutary way of reminding yourself of your own profound and irreparable ignorance than to browse in a well-stocked secondhand bookshop. It is also a way to overcome misanthropy, if to such you are inclined, for you cannot help but admire your fellow beings who have, over ...
Ariana Grande, of whom I had not heard until Salman Abedi killed 22 people at her "concert" in Manchester, has had herself tattooed with a picture of a bee, a symbol of Manchester's industrious industrial past, as a "permanent tribute" to the city. Apparently, the other performers ...
The British Medical Journal reported last week that Dutch legislators are considering the extension of their law of euthanasia to old people who are not fatally ill but merely tired of life and who therefore wish to shuffle off this mortal coil before their time. If the Devil should not have all ...
You know you are getting old when even the judges look young; but another sign of aging is a failure to understand the humor of the young, a failure that on my part now goes back at least two decades. The things that the young laugh at nowadays escape me entirely. They seem to me offensive and ...
In the literal sense, the West triumphed in the Cold War. Nevertheless, a kind of creeping sovietization has overtaken it as if in revenge. I don"t want to exaggerate, or exaggerate much: We don"t yet fear the midnight knock on the door, we are still free to go where we like, and we are not ...
The sentencing of the governor of Jakarta to two years" imprisonment for blasphemy may seem like a throwback to medieval intolerance, but it is far more than that. It is a reminder that the suppression of the freedom of others is more fun than the exercise of freedom. The Muslim masses who ...
Like most governments these days, the Irish government is a patron of the arts. The problem is that most governments know as much about the arts as I know about how to select camels for a camel race. Naturally, therefore, governments rely on advisers to advise them on artistic matters, in effect ...
