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 ...

Recently we stayed a few days in Belgium with friends who had very well-brought-up children, that is to say polite and with excellent manners without having had their own personalities extinguished or crushed by formality. They were respectful of their elders without being obsequious and it was a ...

In some countries, including my own, there has been of late an increasing tendency to the Nigerianization of the economy: that is to say, the hope of wealth not by increasing it in aggregate but by participation in one dubious scheme or another. This is a potentially dangerous thought. Nothing is ...

On the day that Donald John Trump was declared the victor in the American election I was on my way to Madrid to give a talk. I would be less than frank if I did not admit that, such being the smallness of the human mind, or at least the smallness of my mind, the prospect of the talk I was about to ...

You can get angry with machines, especially when you haven"€™t the faintest idea how they work. They seem to break down out of spite, just at the wrong moment; it is as if they are not completely inanimate but possessed of souls with ill will. I once had a very unreliable car"€”coincidentally ...

Who would be a politician? It is like living in permanent fear of ambush, with everyone waiting to pounce on the first stupid thing that you say or do. To be a politician, therefore, you must be prepared to endure a thousand humiliations large or small for the sake of power. Which is one of the ...

The great sinologist and literary essayist Simon Leys began his essay on the French writer André Malraux by telling the story of a village priest who reduced his whole congregation to tears by the ardor of his preaching"€”all, that is, except one man, a visitor. He did not cry, and after the ...

If Mr. Trump had been caught on video talking about early Sienese painting I should have been genuinely shocked and surprised. As it was, could anyone really have been shocked or surprised by his remarks about women? There was something distinctly ersatz, therefore, not to say contrived and ...

I rarely buy The Sunday Times, a British newspaper with as many sections and supplements as Joseph's coat had colors. It is an unwieldy journal to read, about as convenient as riding a bicycle in an airplane. I bought it the other day, though, and as usual admired the consummate skill with which ...