Once again the only country of any size that, as far as I can see, emerges from the Olympic Games with any credit is India. Accounting for something like a sixth of the world's population, it had not"the last time I looked at the table"won a single medal in any event. This proves that, at ...
The recent events in Turkey interested me in part because I am about to pay my annual visit to that country. I always go to the same place, in which, though it is very Westernized, I have noticed over the years that the muezzins"or rather, the recordings of muezzins"have grown louder, and ...
It is hardly surprising that newspapers nowadays more and more resemble magazines that are produced weekly or monthly instead of daily. With modern technology they can hardly any longer be the first to break news; as their circulations fall and journalists are "let go""to use a ...
For reasons unnecessary to go into, I once found myself at a loose end for a few months on the island of Jersey in the English Channel. For something to do I went into the archives and researched a book about three murders that were committed in Jersey in the space of three months in the middle of ...
When I was a boy I had a classmate (with whom my relations were neither particularly friendly nor particularly unfriendly) whose ambition was to be a taxidermist. He gave us to understand that he knew already how to stuff a weasel, a dog, or a cat, but he wanted to move on to bigger game such as ...
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 ...
