For a number of reasons I am fond of reading books of essays by literary journalists from the 1880s to the 1930s. First, they are very cheap to buy, since they are not otherwise ...

The English writer E.M. Forster infamously said that if he had to betray either his country or a friend, he hoped he would betray the former. He was cheered for it by Oxford ...

The much-discussed death of Prince last week brings up an old question: Why do pop stars tend to be rather fey? Granted, using Prince as an example of any statistical pattern is ...

It would be an ignominious defeat worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy if abortion ends up being the issue that derails Trumpas the Tank Engine. By claiming that there would have to ...

Whenever I am in Paris I stay near Père-Lachaise, the greatest cemetery in the world, and I always take at least one walk in it. It is, like life and literature, inexhaustible; ...

Due to the vagaries of the lunar calendar, the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising in Dublin is either just past us or coming up in late April. In either case, today is a ...

The factually challenged (and largely plagiarized) 1977 TV miniseries Roots had an undeniable influence on how millions of Americans, black and white, view the era of slavery. A ...

Shortly after my arrival for a short visit to New York City, I had the happy idea of going to the criminal courts on Centre Street. They are the Metropolitan Opera of the ...

Althea Gibson was a black American lady tennis player who won Wimbledon and many other major championships during the late "€™50s. She was also a very good singer and a friendly ...

Last week, I pointed out that the social sciences were suffering from mirror-image problems: the much-publicized Replication Crisis, in which academics announce trivial findings ...

I have reached the age of making lists of things to do. This is partly an implicit recognition of declining powers, but also the result of a long-standing desire, so far never ...

With data becoming ever more abundant, this should be the golden age of the social sciences. And yet they seem to be suffering two mirror-image nervous breakdowns"€”the ...

A simple model that helps make much about the modern world easier to comprehend is that of a high-low tag team against the middle. As part of a time-tested strategy of divide and ...

In Pyongyang I once nearly marched past the Great Leader himself (Kim Il Sung), but the British delegation to the World Festival of Youth and Students, into which I had managed to ...

On 30 December, 2015, the French newspaper Libération had a huge word dominating its front page: Fuck! The expletive was used to commemorate, lament, or celebrate the death ...

As a Christmas present, I received the book version of The Hard Problem, the latest play by Sir Tom Stoppard. It's the great Tory playwright's first new work for the stage since ...