It is said, invariably with a sigh and in mournful tones, that the press is biased"€”a proposition I find puzzling. The press is supposed to have a bias. Complaining that a newspaper is not objective is like complaining about a fish's incessant ...

A prosperous, roly-poly Greek with a name that sounds like an Aztec root vegetable once proclaimed that if you have a brain, A cannot be both A and not A. Some twenty-one centuries later, a bookworm-poor, reed-thin, dark-cloaked Dane who for most of ...

Avant-garde is an epidemic.  From modern architecture—an added misfortune, like a hunchback struck down by elephantiasis—there is simply no escape, as its creedal symbols pursue me all over the European continent like the fiends of ...

A pair of Siamese twins in formaldehyde, provided the liquid was a shocking pink and the infants were joined together in some particularly disturbing manner, would have made for a suitable exhibit in one of the tents, as doubtless would the picture, ...

In the 1930s even some of the older and more intellectual Russians, including those who had seen a bit of the world in their youth, believed that the United States was the land of the Yellow Devil, meaning gold. It was said that when one American ...

Anybody who has ever made merry by leafing through an issue of Cosmopolitan knows that today's successful young woman is happily married yet still happier single, that she stands by her man yet has many lovers, that she is virtuous yet possessed of ...

Even in some of my saner moments, however, I can detect within myself a tendency of character that transforms me into a kind of Taki of the Gutter. Thus I may be the only writer you will ever read who has met both Paris Hilton and David Frum, a fact ...

Stalin, who espoused the profound rationalism of a Constitution that made socially useful labour into universal law, lost out on Europe's scientific genius and therefore on world domination. So did Hitler, who espoused no less remarkable a ...

I am not saying that we must all turn to Eastern mysticism, or try walking on water after a heavy lunch, or even be portrayed by Francis Bacon in attitudes expressive of inner torment. But come on, live a little! Let the careless child burn his ...