Last night the streetlights in my pleasant little English market town were switched off at midnight. In fact they"ve been switching them off at midnight for two months, but I have not been here to notice it. However, in this little development (or is it a reversal of development?) may be ...
From the unwanted compulsory television point of view, there are far worse airports than Paris Charles de Gaulle. At least no sound emanates from the devilish screens installed there, whereas in many airports the sound is turned on loud enough to be hard to ignore, but too soft to be intelligible ...
Recently I went from Paris to London for lunch, returning for dinner. This is made easy nowadays, though not necessarily cheap, by the Eurostar train. I am not usually given to such extravagances, always seeing personal penury just around the corner if I indulge in them, but my favorite cousin ...
One buys books for peculiar reasons, and not only because they are good: for example, a few days ago I bought a book for its title and its opening sentence. The title was How Do We Become Criminal? and the opening sentence was "The history of crime is that of humanity." We don"t need ...
When, a little more than 45 years ago, we arrived in the city of Peshawar from Afghanistan, it seemed a peaceful and romantic place. True enough, the Khyber Pass had not been safe to travel after dark, but the danger was from brigandage of an almost folkloric rather than of a political or religious ...
I was in New York when Lehman Brothers collapsed, in Dubai when property lost half its value in a few days, and in Dublin recently when there was a demonstration against the government. I do not conclude from this that I am the harbinger of trouble, but rather that trouble is the universal ...
One stumbles across such interesting things on the Internet. For example, while browsing the Guardian newspaper's website today I alighted on a short video by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek on the nature of true freedom. I knew that Žižek was very famous"one knows these ...
Life is full of little ironies, one of them in my case being that I have more time than ever before, now that I have retired from practice, to read medical journals. I find the experience a little unnerving. In the old days I glanced through the journals and naïvely supposed that the ...
Someone must have noticed that I waste a lot of my time, because I received today, through the Internet, an offer of a new method of something called personal time management. The new method was necessary, apparently, because the old methods "no longer work in a networked business world that ...
One of the merits of Christianity at its best is that it reconciles the infinite greatness of man with his infinite littleness. On the one hand man is created in the image of God, and each and every individual is unique as an object of God's love and concern; on the other, he is as nothing by ...
