On the whole I am in favor of freedom of expression, though sometimes I am equally in favor of freedom from expression. God preserve us from film stars telling us what they think about the situation in Somalia or the state of the rain forests in Borneo! There ought to be a law against it: as ...

One of the reasons I read the liberal newspapers when I am in Britain"€”apart from the fact that they are the best"€”is that they irritate me so by their smug self-righteousness (my self-righteousness is never smug, it is justified), and I have reached an age when the ability to be irritated by ...

Life is a struggle, or at least a pendulum swing, between complacency and panic. No doubt most of us are more inclined by temperament to one than to the other, and it is a moot point as to which, when unjustified or inappropriate, does the more harm. Personally I am more inclined to complacency ...

Recently I violated my self-imposed code of conduct by appearing on television. It was for a so-called discussion program on which one of the subjects was the overdiagnosis of depression as a medical condition. Of course I knew the futility of such programs, in which a serious subject is discussed ...

A few weeks ago I noticed the following slogan painted on the walls of a supermarket in France: Hitler, Sarko"€”même combat [Hitler, Sarkosy"€”same battle] One didn"€™t know whether to laugh, cry, be angry or even pitying: for it is not necessary to be an unequivocal admirer of the ...

The late Jean-Claude Duvalier, better known as Baby Doc, played only a small part in my life. I arrived in Haiti for the first time two years after his downfall, during the presidency of the eminently respectable academic, Leslie Manigat, who was soon to be removed by army coup. The pudgy bovine ...

I used to think that no one would ever again smell like my grandmother: that is to say, of naphthalene mothballs. She had them even in her handbag in case a moth was lurking there; the odor preceded her like a cold front on a weather map. I adored the smell and was fascinated by it.  There were ...

Some years ago, in a flash of inspiration while in Istanbul, I had an idea of a kind that occurs to me infrequently: I thought of an entirely new institution, the National Museum of Kitsch. I would collect particularly egregious examples of kitsch and display them in a gallery, thereby performing, ...

Efes beer, the Turkish lager, was the nearest until recently that I had come to Ephesus, unless you count St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, which I read more in a spirit of enquiry than of faith. Recently I had the opportunity to visit those magnificent ruins, and very grateful I was for ...

The other day I behaved badly for once: not very badly (I should hardly have confessed to that), but still worse than I like to think that I normally behave. It was in a busy railway station. I was more than an hour early for my train and, now acutely (and chronically) aware of the fast ...