The first thing I noticed about the headline of a recent story on the Guardian website was its grammar: Nauru, Second refugee at Australian detention centre sets themselves alight. This is English at its most hideous: No one with a minimal regard for the language could have written it, perhaps ...

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said of William Shakespeare, the 400th anniversary of whose death has just passed, that he was capable of writing tragedies only about individuals, or small groups of individuals, because he lived at a time without ideology. The latter was necessary for killing on a mass ...

The longer I live, the more humbug there is. Whether this is a real increase or merely a reflection of a more acute sensitivity towards it, I am not sure: There have always been humbugs. But if it is possible to bathe in a sea of humbug, then that is what I"€”and, I assume, others"€”seem to be ...

When the news broke that more than 11 million documents had, in effect, been stolen from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, my first reaction was one of awe. Eleven million! My personal library contains about 20,000 volumes; at 300 pages each (on average), that would make a mere 6 million ...

Thirty years ago, a taxi driver in Mexico City taught me, though I cannot remember the exact context in which he did so, some lines from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the learned Mexican nun of the 17th century, a sage and poetess famous not only in Mexico but in Europe. I have never forgotten them ...

Whenever I am in Paris I stay near Père-Lachaise, the greatest cemetery in the world, and I always take at least one walk in it. It is, like life and literature, inexhaustible; and after all, the paths not only of glory but of journalism, too, lead but to the grave. On the way there this time ...

I flew to Paris the day Brussels was bombed. It was a fine day"€”weather-wise"€”and as I looked down with a clear view on that vast and wealthy city, its millions of citizens going about their business as if nothing had happened, I thought how stupid it was of a handful of miserable ...

Ours is a golden age of expensive cheap trash"€”or is it cheap expensive trash? Such, at any rate, were my thoughts on leafing through a catalog of a luxury gewgaw and clothes manufacturer, whose name I shall not reveal. The catalog was lying about in a friend's house in New York and I picked it ...

Shortly after my arrival for a short visit to New York City, I had the happy idea of going to the criminal courts on Centre Street. They are the Metropolitan Opera of the criminal-justice system, and as an occasional expert witness in British courts, I wanted to see how these things were done in ...

An English judge called Beverley Lunt, known locally for her leniency, recently suspended the prison sentence of two brothers who appeared before her because they were contrite, or rather because they expressed contrition, which, as we shall see, is not quite the same thing. They were charged with ...