When, half an eternity ago, I was a small boy who collected stamps, I was very favorably disposed toward King Farouk. I noticed that Egyptian stamps were never the same in taste or quality after his overthrow, and in those days I judged countries and their regimes by the taste and quality of the ...

Apart from pulp novels, airport bookshops often have an eccentric selection of books. A few years ago, for example, in the bookshop in the airport nearest my English home, I found a volume devoted to the last meals requested by men about to be executed in Texas. I suppose this was to persuade ...

It took me two attempts to visit the Musée de l"€™histoire vivante"€”the Museum of Living History"€”in Montreuil, in the suburbs of Paris. The first time, because I was with my wife, I went in a taxi. It was not an entirely wasted journey, even though when we arrived, the man at the gate ...

Hillary Clinton, so we are told, kept a spreadsheet devoted to her enemies, whom she rated on a scale of her own devising. I can"€™t say this surprised me: Mrs. Clinton doesn"€™t have a forgiving face. She is more Lady Macbeth than Cordelia (she would be wonderfully cast as the former), and ...

The temper of the times is often revealed by small details in newspapers, and that is why (I tell myself) I still read them, though it is common wisdom that they are on the path to extinction, as dinosaurs were after the great meteor hit the earth 65 million years ago. At any rate, I hope that they ...

According to a poll carried out by the Figaro newspaper, only 17% of the French believe that 2014 will be a good year, but in fact it started very well for France. Only 1,064 cars were burned by youths in the banlieues this New Year’s Eve"€”about a hundred fewer than last year. Who says ...

My late friend, the distinguished economist Peter Bauer, used to say that the only true unemployment in the modern world was among satirists, for the world had grown so ridiculous that what was intended as satire was either a description of what already existed or a prophecy of what would soon come ...

Chile is one of many faraway countries of which I know nothing, but I was intrigued to read in the French press of its recent presidential election. Socialist candidate Michelle Bachelet won by a large majority of the votes cast: 62.16% against 37.83% for her opponent. I presume that the remaining ...

The unctuous pseudo-grief in the West after Nelson Mandela's death at the good age of 95 was to me nauseating in the extreme; it was so overdone that, though I am no Freudian, it raised suspicions in my mind of reaction formation, the psychological defense mechanism against unwanted thoughts ...

I think I suffer from the only behavioral disorder that does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. This is rather odd because the disorder has been known for at least two centuries, ever since the Reverend Thomas Dibdin published his great work ...