While in Dublin recently I read an article in the newspaper about the Greek crisis. It was in the Irish Times and was very serious. The author, the well-known economic journalist Martin Wolf, asked a series of questions about the crisis and then answered them. For example he asked whether the ...
Nothing human is alien to me, I understand nothing that is human: I cannot quite make up my mind which describes my situation the better. But certainly one of the things that I do not understand is the cult of celebrity; it mystifies me completely. It is not that I am uninterested in gossip, ...
"Only connect" " such were the famous (almost) concluding words of E. M. Forster's novel, Howard's Way. I think if Forster were alive today and still writing, he would end the book differently: "Only disconnect." It is very difficult to disconnect these days, psychologically if ...
The least one can say of the psychiatric treatment given to Andreas Lubitz, the pilot who killed 149 people as well as himself in crashing the Germanwings aircraft into the Alps, is that it was not very successful. Indeed, its outcome was about as disastrous as any in the history of medicine, but ...
We shouldn"t be irritated when politicians utter absurdities " they are only doing their job, after all " but nevertheless we are irritated. Unfortunately, different politicians irritate different people. Pascal said that most of our problems arise from our inability to sit quietly in a ...
The late Simon Leys, the great Sinologist and literary essayist, once wrote a little essay on the first lines of novels. He was inspired to do so by having picked up G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill in a second-hand bookshop and read its first words: "The human race, to which so ...
... such stuff as madmen Tongue, and brain not; either both, or nothing, Or senseless speaking, or a speaking such As sense cannot untie. Cymbeline, Act 1, scene v All doctors have noticed that when one ...
No one who reads Seyyid Qutb's book Milestones could be in any doubt that the destruction of ancient monuments by ISIS or the Taliban is perfectly in keeping with Islamist thought. Milestones is an important book not because of its merits, either intellectual or literary, but because of its ...
Self-blame is no doubt salutary when one is truly blameworthy, but there is also a kind of self-blame that is exaggerated, insincere, grandiose, and exhibitionistic. It is also abstract and collective rather than individual; it is the kind of self-blame that intellectuals specialize in expressing ...
Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier) was one of the people killed in the attack on Charlie Hebdo on 7 January this year. He was a writer and editor as well as a cartoonist, and recently I bought a slim volume of his articles called A Little Treatise of Intolerance. It was, in a way, the least I ...
