The Japanese company Nikkei has bought the Financial Times, and I wish them well of it. There can be few duller publications in the world, in whose pages, unless one is interested in share prices and the like, one seeks in vain for an item of interest, let alone illumination. I sometimes read it to ...

I hate sweet drinks"€”Coca-Cola et al."€”so passionately that I grow angry whenever I see someone buy or drink one. I hate their taste, I hate the horrible plastic bottles in which they come; to see people carry them around with them as if they were dolls or comfort blankets infuriates me. It ...

Among the measures demanded of Greece by its creditors in return for yet another pretense that its debt is actually performing and therefore does not have to be written off, I noticed that for Sunday trading, Greece's stores and shops must henceforth be open, or allowed to open, on Sunday. From ...

There seems to be growing anti-German feeling in France, at least if what I read is anything to go by (which it might not be, of course). For example, a book with the title Bismarck Herring (The German Poison) is on sale everywhere. It is not by an unknown person, but rather by a very well-known ...

The ways of human perversity are legion, and secretly we are glad of it, for it would be a dull world"€”a kind of ideal Switzerland raised to a higher power"€”without them. The bizarre, the wicked, and the perverse entertain us even as we condemn them or shake our heads over them in pretended ...

Over the past few years I don"€™t know how many hours I"€™ve wasted reading articles in newspapers about the Greek debt crisis. It isn"€™t as if I could have affected it in one way or the other. Moreover, newspapers these days, which cannot compete with the immediacy of the electronic media, ...

When a Nobel Prize winner can be hounded from his university chair by the harridans of the Internet (or any other self-constituted group of fanatics), the outlook for freedom of speech is not good. The West, having undergone its own Cultural Revolution, has taken up the baton of Maoist ...

No one can build a decent palace anymore. I agree that this is not one of the greatest social problems of our time, but it must nevertheless be revelatory of something economic or cultural. My first reaction when seeing President Erdogan standing at the foot of the stairs of his palace in Ankara, ...

There comes a time in any man's life when he wants to accumulate no more possessions, but rather disembarrass himself of those he already has. For otherwise he is in danger of becoming like one of those old people who throw nothing away and die among piles of old newspapers, documents, packaging, ...

Everyone supposes that he is the world authority on his own life, especially on his own thoughts and experiences. But is this really so? I began to doubt it when, the other day, I leafed through the copious notebooks that I have kept over the years. I carry a notebook with me at most times ...