A single death, said Stalin, is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic. We know, alas, precisely what he meant by this cynical remark: it is beyond our human capacity to grasp emotionally, rather than intellectually, the suffering of more than a few people at a time. As soon as that number is ...

Those who irritate us and give us grounds for righteous indignation are our secret benefactors, for there are few states of mind more gratifying than that of righteous indignation. And therefore, in a certain way, I should be grateful to L"€™Oréal, the enormous French cosmetics company, for ...

For a number of years I used to write a weekly column in the British Medical Journal about medicine and literature. The field, of course, was vast, inexhaustible, because medicine deals with birth and death and everything in between"€”as does literature. Many doctors have taken to the pen, a ...

Walking through Amsterdam recently, a paradox that I had long noticed in an inchoate way formulated itself clearly in my mind. It was this: A century ago, there would have been one clothes shop for every hundred well-dressed people. Nowadays there is one well-dressed person (if that) for every ...

A major epidemic in America, which seems to me to have received rather less publicity than its scale would warrant, is the dramatic increase in the number of deaths in the country from overdose of prescription opioids. In 2010, for example, there were 16,500 such deaths, more than four times as ...

Recently I read an interview with the President of Niger, the francophone country to the north of Nigeria, about Boko Haram, the Islamist group that kidnapped more than 200 Nigerian girls and threatened to sell them into some kind of slavery. President Mahamadou Issoufou said, by way of ...

In my youth, hard though it is for me to recall it now, I was quite good at sport. I could never have become better than quite good at it, however, because I never took it seriously enough to do so. A game for me was but a game: I could put my heart and soul into it only while it ...

When I arrived in the city of Maiduguri nearly thirty years ago, everyone was away at the public executions. It was a ghost town until the spectators returned as from a football match in which the home team had won a decisive victory, as it were. It is true that one of the three men executed told ...

Resentment is the one emotion that can last a lifetime and will never let you down. All other emotions are fleeting and unreliable by comparison. I have tried hating someone for years, but found it impossible: hatred fades like the colors of pressed flowers. But resentment! It is the perfect ...

Everyone loves a tyrant, provided he is far enough away or long enough ago. Tyrants are much more interesting than so-called democratic politicians, especially nowadays, when so many of the latter have done nothing with their lives except sit electoral office. What, for example, would Latin ...