A British judge is reported to have wept recently as he sentenced two murderers for a particularly vicious and sadistic killing. A reporter for the BBC apparently wept on air as he described the aftermath of the Paris massacre. I couldn"t help thinking of Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself: Being ...
To celebrate the arrival of the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, in Britain, the Guardian newspaper reported that many eminent British writers had, in an open letter, urged the British prime minister, David Cameron, to raise the question of increasing intolerance of dissent in India under ...
Last week I was irritated to receive an e-mail from the British Medical Journal asking me what I thought of its new format. What I thought of it was unprintable; and now that we know that e-mails are as permanent as the Rock of Gibraltar, I thought it wiser not to answer. The Journal claimed that ...
La Rochefoucauld said that it is easier to give good advice than to take it, to which he might have added that it is also easier to agree with good advice than to act on it. Enacting wisdom is a little like speaking a foreign language that is pronounced perfectly in the head but comes out of the ...
The British government-funded cultural establishment's fawning and flattering but insincere attitude toward popular culture and the demotic was shown once again in a recent production of Hamlet at the National Theatre, with Benedict Cumberbatch playing the Prince. The text of the play was ...
There is no quality more fleeting than modernity and nothing staler than an analysis of a past crisis that was written at the time it was happening. The problem with our present economic crisis is that it has been going on since 2007 (or is it 2006 or 2008, one tends to gets a little muddled in ...
I am no great admirer of management as a science or of managers as people. The latter tend to speak a strange language, a jargon neither elegant nor poetic; they buy very dull books at airports, they are often shifty and ruthless, and they seem to me to live in a constant condition of bad faith. ...
An old Australian judge of my acquaintance, an art collector and general connoisseur, now dead, alas, had no interest in cars and used to answer inquiries as to what car he possessed in the most lapidary fashion: "A green one." My interest in cars is scarcely greater than his; my main ...
Doctor Johnson wisely advised writers to strike out those passages in their own work that they found particularly fine; but the opposite of this advice is followed each week by The Lancet, one of the world's leading medical journals. Each week, its cover bears in bold letters between quotation ...
There were only a few refugees still on the seafront when I arrived in Bodrum (Turkey), and there were even fewer of them by the time I left a number of days later. Where and how they had all gone I do not know. The Greek island of Kos, only two and a half miles away, had apparently been similarly ...
