Often I have thought, or supposed, that there must be a single unifying explanation of all the woes or social problems of the Western world, if only I could find it. But I have not found it: the nearest I have come to explaining the rise of drug-taking, minor incivility, psychological distress, ...
Whether looseness of language is a consequence or a cause of looseness of thought I cannot say. No doubt it is sometimes the one and sometimes the other. Perhaps"to indulge in a little looseness of thought and language of my own"the relationship between them is dialectical. But certainly ...
One little phrase in Le Monde's report of an incident in Nice"in which a man aged 30 called Moussa Coulibaly attacked with a knife three soldiers guarding a Jewish community center"caught my attention: rien de bien méchant, nothing very bad. It was used in describing his prior ...
"Last night hope for real change brought the smiles back to Greek faces after five long years": that was a fairly representative statement in the British left-wing press on the day following the Greek election. And the photos that usually accompanied such statements did indeed show numbers ...
Generally I don"t remember my dreams, and to judge by the few that I do remember I am rather glad that I don"t. Nor do I believe, pace Freud, that they are the royal road to the unconscious, still less that they are auguries of the future. On the contrary, I think that they are the ...
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 ...
