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 ...

It often seems to me that the first qualification for producers of operas these days is proneness to severe lapses of taste, a kind of epilepsy of the judgment, or even a complete absence of aesthetic common sense. Orgies, if not actually a compulsory element of any production, are at least very ...

I think I too could be a Nobel Prize winner in economics"€”at least if an interview with Joseph Stiglitz in a recent edition of Le Figaro, the French newspaper, on the occasion of the publication of one of his books published in French, is anything to go by. It is not that Mr. Stiglitz said ...