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 ...

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 ...