Paris is the best city in the world for cinema. You have only to go round the corner to see an intelligent and unusual film. In other places it takes a special effort to do so, if it is possible at all. I once spent a week in Paris seeing two or even three films a day from exotic places"€”exotic, ...

The trouble with vandalism is that it is fun, especially for people of modest accomplishment. The urge to destroy, said Bakunin, Marx's anarchist contemporary, is also a constructive urge, thus demonstrating remarkable obtuseness about the human heart. Destruction brings a sense of relief, albeit ...

Robert Mugabe, sempiternal president of Zimbabwe, was recently booed and jeered in parliament, suggesting that, after more than a third of a century in power and at the age of 91, he still has a thing or two to learn about being an absolute dictator. Of course, he might also be a believer in the ...

What part do truth and evidence play in our beliefs? A larger part in ours than in those of others, of course, for we are, or at least consider ourselves to be, more rational almost by definition than anyone else. But if we are honest, which we so rarely are, we must admit that we generally fall ...

There is a strange thing about modern ugliness: It is militant and proselytizing, and not just the result of thoughtlessness, poverty, lack of skill, and so forth. It might properly be called ideological. It is not so much the result of bad taste as of opposition to good taste as a desideratum. I ...

Jacques Chirac, when he was mayor of Paris, offered the municipal workers a deal: They could have a short workweek if in exchange they agreed to verification that they actually worked during those hours. The workers, or their leaders, rejected the offer with contumely, from which the most likely ...

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 ...