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 ...

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 ...