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 insinuate myself, decided at the last moment that I was not quite martial enough in my bearing for the immense honor of ...
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 at the age of 70 of a rock star called Lemmy Kilmister. The accompanying picture shows a middle-aged rebellious ...
Credit where credit is due: President Hollande"who until then had never seemed à la hauteur, as the French say, of his exalted position, appearing more like the deputy head of a lycée in Limoges than a head of state"made an excellent speech before both houses of the French parliament ...
There is no racist like an antiracist: That is because he is obsessed by race, whose actual existence as often as not he denies. He looks at the world through race-tinted spectacles, interprets every event or social phenomenon as a manifestation of racism either implicit or explicit, and in general ...
The verdicts in the case of Oscar Pistorius, and the reasoning behind them, seem to me curious. Either Pistorius was guilty of murdering his girlfriend or he was guilty of nothing. I don"t know whether there is anyone who needs to be told who Pistorius is. His surname makes him sound like a ...
With a little effort I can work myself up into a fury of indignation about most things, but strangely enough not about climate change. The whole subject bores me because I can"t really make the whole of the planet the object of my affection or concern. I wish it no harm, of course, but I cannot ...
I think I may safely claim to be one of the few people alive to have flown in a Malian air force DC-3 from Bamako to Timbuktu in the company of a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Laureate in question was Nadine Gordimer, the South African novelist and short-story writer. We were ...
A British judge is reported to have wept recently as he sentenced two murderers for a particularly vicious and sadistic killing. A reporter for the BBC apparently wept on air as he described the aftermath of the Paris massacre. I couldn"t help thinking of Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself: Being ...
To celebrate the arrival of the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, in Britain, the Guardian newspaper reported that many eminent British writers had, in an open letter, urged the British prime minister, David Cameron, to raise the question of increasing intolerance of dissent in India under ...
Last week I was irritated to receive an e-mail from the British Medical Journal asking me what I thought of its new format. What I thought of it was unprintable; and now that we know that e-mails are as permanent as the Rock of Gibraltar, I thought it wiser not to answer. The Journal claimed that ...
