I care nothing for football (soccer to Americans), but I was pleased when Portugal won the European Cup last Sunday. I would have preferred it to be Liechtenstein or San Marino, or best of all Vatican City"that is to say, the smallest country possible. But at least Portugal is not a large ...
Though derided and despised, there is much to be said in favor of mediocrity. It is comfortable and unthreatening, unlike excellence; it makes no demands on us. Who can stand the strain of having to be brilliant all the time, or of having to be careful never to say a banal or obvious thing? Who, ...
Whenever I gave expert evidence in murder trials, I looked at the jury and thought, "What a rabble! How on earth can you expect them to come to any proper conclusion?" None of them ever dressed for the occasion. As they trooped in and out of the jury box, I thought how unattractive and ...
The gift of political prophecy is certainly not mine, and I suspect that the best, most certain way of prophesying correctly is to prophesy often. That way one will, by laws of chance, sometimes be right. The human mind's propensity to remember its successes and forget its failures will see to the ...
Driving through France recently, we stopped for the night in the small town of Loudun. It had that complete, and to me pleasing or even consolatory, deadness common to many small French towns, where there seems to be no activity at all, nothing ever happens except on the tiniest scale, and all ...
Every year Joseph Haydn comes for a few days to the town in which I live when I"m in England. For about five days there are two concerts daily, and for me it is a great luxury to have a string quartet playing almost on my doorstep. I am fond of Haydn's chamber music. But there is no ...
The world is a dangerous place whose inhabitation always ends in death. Is it because or in spite of this that we enjoy scaring ourselves with imaginary dangers? We thrill at trivia in order to forget the overwhelming fact of our mortality. In the Madrid metro recently they relayed a video ...
It is curious that we are never more than a slight physiological or anatomical derangement away from paranoia. An alteration of blood chemistry is often sufficient to make us believe that they are after us, and to act upon the supposition. No doubt evolutionary psychologists would explain this by ...
The Albanian dictator, Enver Hoxha, who died in 1985, has played only a very small part in my life. In my student days I knew a few youthful admirers of his; and some twenty years later I was acquainted with a bookseller who believed that he, Hoxha, had been the only true Marxist-Leninist in the ...
For a number of reasons I am fond of reading books of essays by literary journalists from the 1880s to the 1930s. First, they are very cheap to buy, since they are not otherwise sought after; second, they are generally very well written and often witty; and third, they are mildly instructive (I ...
