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 ...
Of all Western European countries, England is the most richly endowed with unutterably dismal towns and cities, in part the heritage of the Industrial Revolution and in part that of modern architects and town planners. I once wrote of Walsall that it was the ugliest town in the world, to which one ...
From time to time I receive invitations by e-mail to attend conferences on something called medical leadership. "Do you want to be a leader?" ask the invitations, to which the answer, in my case, is "No." I am too old for such an ambition, and in any case I have never had it. I ...
I am never sure whether I should lament the state of the world or be complacent about it. For on the one hand everything is going to the dogs and on the other I am a happy man. Part of my happiness derives, of course, from intimations of approaching apocalypse: There is nothing quite like them ...
Although France is on the same downward slide as Britain, you can tell that it has not yet descended quite as far because it did not win as many medals in the Olympic Games as Britain. Nevertheless, it won more such medals in these Olympics than it ever had before, which is irrefutable proof of its ...
