La Rochefoucauld said that it is easier to give good advice than to take it, to which he might have added that it is also easier to agree with good advice than to act on it. Enacting wisdom is a little like speaking a foreign language that is pronounced perfectly in the head but comes out of the ...
The British government-funded cultural establishment's fawning and flattering but insincere attitude toward popular culture and the demotic was shown once again in a recent production of Hamlet at the National Theatre, with Benedict Cumberbatch playing the Prince. The text of the play was ...
There is no quality more fleeting than modernity and nothing staler than an analysis of a past crisis that was written at the time it was happening. The problem with our present economic crisis is that it has been going on since 2007 (or is it 2006 or 2008, one tends to gets a little muddled in ...
I am no great admirer of management as a science or of managers as people. The latter tend to speak a strange language, a jargon neither elegant nor poetic; they buy very dull books at airports, they are often shifty and ruthless, and they seem to me to live in a constant condition of bad faith. ...
An old Australian judge of my acquaintance, an art collector and general connoisseur, now dead, alas, had no interest in cars and used to answer inquiries as to what car he possessed in the most lapidary fashion: "A green one." My interest in cars is scarcely greater than his; my main ...
Doctor Johnson wisely advised writers to strike out those passages in their own work that they found particularly fine; but the opposite of this advice is followed each week by The Lancet, one of the world's leading medical journals. Each week, its cover bears in bold letters between quotation ...
There were only a few refugees still on the seafront when I arrived in Bodrum (Turkey), and there were even fewer of them by the time I left a number of days later. Where and how they had all gone I do not know. The Greek island of Kos, only two and a half miles away, had apparently been similarly ...
Paris is the best city in the world for cinema. You have only to go round the corner to see an intelligent and unusual film. In other places it takes a special effort to do so, if it is possible at all. I once spent a week in Paris seeing two or even three films a day from exotic places"exotic, ...
The trouble with vandalism is that it is fun, especially for people of modest accomplishment. The urge to destroy, said Bakunin, Marx's anarchist contemporary, is also a constructive urge, thus demonstrating remarkable obtuseness about the human heart. Destruction brings a sense of relief, albeit ...
Robert Mugabe, sempiternal president of Zimbabwe, was recently booed and jeered in parliament, suggesting that, after more than a third of a century in power and at the age of 91, he still has a thing or two to learn about being an absolute dictator. Of course, he might also be a believer in the ...
