The British Medical Association, of which I am an undistinguished member, recently published a booklet entitled A Guide to Effective Communication in the Workplace, which I strongly suspected would be as helpful as a booklet entitled Improving Athletic Performance by Cutting the Achilles Tendon. I ...

On 30 March, 1933, the great German recorder of daily life under the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer, noticed a balloon in a toy shop inscribed with a swastika. In my newspaper on 14 January, 2017, I noticed a photograph of a girl aged 8 years old (I should estimate) holding up a banner at the ...

The claim by Oxfam, the charity that so loves the poor that it is safe to predict that it will never abolish itself no matter how rich humanity becomes, that the eight richest men in the world own as much as the poorer half of the whole of humanity combined, is at first sight extremely startling. ...

The question of intellectual and moral authority is an important one, especially at a time when everyone can and does give his opinion in public about anything and everything. By intellectual and moral authority I do not mean authority in the legal sense, according to which some people are licensed ...

The French, I think, must be world champions in the production of books lamenting the state of their economy (they are also good at taking antidepressants). Occasionally, it is true, someone writes a book to the effect that things are not so very bad in France, in fact that they are really quite ...

Future historians, if there are any, will look on our epoch as one of bad temper. The ease with which people are provoked to the expression of outrage suggests that it has a very important function in our mental life, if not necessarily in our mental equilibrium. Outrage is a substitute for ...

For the past three months or so I have suffered from, or at least experienced, a condition called discoid eczema on the instep of the sole of my right foot. It is always satisfying for a doctor to diagnose himself: I remember once examining my own blood for malaria, and my delight at finding it. ...

We should all like to know why some people become terrorists, other than for the most obvious reason: that to kill, maim, and destroy, supposedly for a good cause or some allegedly higher purpose, is a delight to a certain kind of person, worth even dying for. In addition, I doubt that there are ...

Exhortation is almost as futile as it is inevitable, at least if measured by its immediate results. I doubt that there is anyone who has neither exhorted nor been exhorted, and who has not continued sweetly down his own self-destructive path simply because it his own. La Rochefoucauld said that it ...

Just as everyone has his favorite crime, so everyone has his favorite dictator. For much of the 20th century, Fidel Castro was the darling of the intellectuals: partly because, like them, he was so slovenly in appearance, and partly because he represented so completely their wish fulfillment ...