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 "upper" 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 ...
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 ...
