Sitting in a café in a station in France recently, I observed a young man sitting near me gazing into his telephone screen. No cobra hypnotized by a snake charmer could have been more mesmerized than he: He seemed to have been turned, or to have turned himself, into some kind of automaton. Of ...

Human error, wrote Prof. James Reason in his book on that widespread phenomenon, is a large subject, and so is stupidity. To inform myself further on it, I recently bought in France a special edition of a magazine devoted to the psychology of stupidity—as if to suggest that there were something ...

It is now many years since I practiced medicine in an insalubrious part of a British city, but a case in France brought memories of that time. I am not sure that the memories of that time are entirely happy, but they are certainly interesting. The case in question is that of a person so far known ...

The most famous line in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s whole large oeuvre is the opening of her Sonnet 43 from the Portuguese: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Having no poetic faculty, I am, like much of humanity, more inclined to ask: What in life irritates me? Let me count the ways. ...

Convention is like nature: You throw it out with a pitchfork, yet it will return. The very attempt to escape it as such, merely because it is convention, is itself deeply conventional. This is not to say, either, that convention ought to be blindly followed just because it is convention. ...

A kindly friend of mine drew my attention to an article in the Guardian newspaper about a British couple, Craig and Lindsay Foreman, who are currently being held hostage, or as bargaining chips for future use, in Iran. They were voyaging round the world, intending to stay but a few days in Iran, ...

When a country is intent on committing suicide, as is Britain, it celebrates the very things that have led, or are leading, to its demise. Whether this is because it thinks it no longer has a right to exist and the world would be better off without it, or whether it is because, when something ...

In the old days (whenever they were), people in Britain who were arrested by the police and questioned were told that they did not have to say anything, but anything that they did say might be taken down and used in evidence against them. This was all perfectly clear, and the wise criminal kept his ...

In the days when I would occasionally report from far-flung and obscure countries—not far-flung and obscure to their inhabitants, of course—I would often rely on the opinions of taxi drivers. They were usually far more reliable than the opinions of officials, who had an official axe to ...