A short while ago, I read a review of a history of pedantry. A pedant, I take it, is a man who delights more in error than in truth. He does not want to learn, he wants to correct. I have several books in my library, some of them quite long, in which a pedantic previous reader has underlined a ...
It is a truth universally acknowledged that children in Britain have more miserable or wretched childhoods than any others in Europe. This is in large part because of the population’s growing incompetence in the art of living, but it is also almost traditional that the British do not like their ...
If these days I stay in an expensive hotel, it is because someone else has paid for it. Left to my own devices, I stay in cheap hotels because I prefer them. There was a time, when I could not afford to do so, when I enjoyed staying in luxurious establishments, but now that I can afford to do so, ...
Walking recently in a quiet quarter of Geneva—is there any other kind of quarter in Geneva?—I looked up and saw something strange. Everywhere in Geneva is expensive, and this was not the least expensive part of it. Draped from the window of a flat in a fin de siècle building, a flat that must ...
The modern world is one of both convenience and inconvenience. For example, you can buy an air ticket in a trice (who remembers travel agents, airline offices, and laboriously filled tickets?), but you are enjoined to arrive ever earlier and wait ever longer at the airport. One secret of ...
Like most human beings, I have my moments of envy (some of us have more than mere moments, of course, and make of envy the ruling passion of their lives). When I see the vast salaries paid to chief executives, the thought, or perhaps I should say emotion, crosses my mind that it is wrong that they ...
Arriving in Paris in the middle of the most severe political crisis in France since the mass uprising of spoiled brats in 1968, I looked around for signs of it in the street. There were none, of course: People were going about their business as usual. The simple restaurant to which we always go ...
In response to the murder outside a synagogue in Manchester by a man of Syrian origin, grateful to live in the free society, the British Medical Association put out a statement in which it said, inter alia: The BMA is appalled by the horrific attack on a synagogue in Manchester. For such an attack ...
Very shortly before he was shot dead by a single bullet in front of 3,000 students in Utah, Charlie Kirk had the following exchange with a student: STUDENT: Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last ten years? KIRK: Too many. STUDENT: Five in ten years. How ...
