I noticed a very pretty girl sitting not far from me on a bus ride of about 45 minutes last week. Soon after the bus departed, she took out her makeup and spent about thirty ...

“There is no art,” says King Duncan in Macbeth, “to find the mind’s construction in the face.” In other words, one cannot tell a person from his face. Well, one has to ...

Polonius: Do you know me, my lord? Hamlet: Excellent well; you are a fishmonger. —Hamlet When Hamlet, playing the lunatic, calls the king’s chief counselor, Polonius, a ...

Ideology is political religion, said the conservative sage Russell Kirk. And what is the defining dogma of the political religion, or ideology, of America in 2022? Is it not ...

A friend of mine is kind enough to send me little signs of the times that he finds scattered everywhere. His most recent offering is a photograph of enormously fat people, ...

I wish I loved the Human Race; I wish I loved its silly face; I wish I liked the way it talks; I wish I liked the way it walks... —Sir Walter Raleigh (1861–1922) During the ...

Back in 2000, Vladimir Putin repeatedly petitioned for Russia to be admitted to NATO, according to George Robertson, former defense minister of Britain, and my friend Oliver ...

“It is a beautiful spring day,” wrote my grandfather to my mother, “and the sun is shining brightly, but there is no sun bright enough to penetrate the dark clouds that ...

Never has the contrast between the scale of world events and my own little personal concerns been so great. While millions flee bombardment, and the world economy ...

It is not often that the title of an article in the Guardian newspaper makes me laugh because of its absurdity, but I laughed when I read the ...

I love a good cemetery, and cemeteries do not come much better than the one in Highgate in London, which I visited recently while staying nearby. It is romantically ...

It’s foolish to speculate about the future course of a war, but three weeks into Mr. Putin’s War, it’s evident that Russia’s Plan A laid an egg. Apparently, Plan A was, ...

For the last few nights, before I go to sleep and when I wake up, I have watched the flies on the ceiling of my bedroom. There are about six or seven of them; there used to be far ...

Three years ago I wrote about a girl I dated in the 1990s who slowly but inexorably fell to paranoid schizophrenia. The hardest part of the end-stage of that relationship was ...

What is it to grow old, asked Matthew Arnold as the first line of his poem “Growing Old,” which he published in 1867 when he himself was 45, a greater age then than now, ...

People, it seems, are increasingly unable to bear the presence in a room of someone who is of different political opinion from theirs. We have now become adept at gauging the ...