Politeness is a virtue. But, as with all virtues, it becomes a vice when carried too far. It is not merely that it can be oleaginous; it can be pusillanimous, the cowardly avoidance of uncomfortable disagreement when such disagreement becomes necessary. These thoughts came to my mind at the bus ...

Sigmund Freud’s notion of a death instinct always seemed preposterous to me, but now I am not so sure. At any rate, there seems to exist a death wish, and in the Western world it has become almost a matter of mass hysteria. It takes various forms, each with its own rationalization. Man, after ...

Many a foreign correspondent, sent to an obscure country of which he knows nothing but which has suddenly drawn the world’s attention to itself by a terrible but soon-to-be-forgotten crisis, has based his report from the country on what the taxi driver told him on the way from the airport to the ...

Last week I reviewed a book published by an American academic press—it hardly matters the title or author, for in the respect to which I wish to draw your attention they are almost all the same these days. With few exceptions, they capitalize the word black when it refers to a person, while ...

When I learned that Martin Amis, the novelist, had died, I felt a stab of sorrow. I did not know him personally, and heard him speak only once, at the memorial service for an acquaintance of mine. He spoke well, but it was not an occasion for rhetorical brilliance. He behaved like a perfectly ...

The ability of governments to get everything the wrong way round is so commonplace that it should no longer surprise us. It is as if they feared to solve a problem lest they should have nothing to do. The Iraqi government is the latest of many to announce that it will henceforth abandon the U.S. ...

For the moment—though for how long, one does not know—the Oxford University Press is sticking to its guns. Good for it! In these days of moral cowardice that is both profound and widespread, even a cartilaginous backbone seems like a rod of iron. The Press says that, despite protests, it will ...

It goes without saying that there should, for reasons of social justice, be full representation of all demographic groups in all human endeavors: for example, in scientific fraud. There is, apparently, a lamentable underrepresentation of women in biomedical research papers subsequently retracted ...

Hell, wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, is other people; in which case purgatory must be other people’s taste. Every time I feel my misanthropy flagging, I go down to the local bric-a-brac warehouse, grandly called an antiques center, and remind myself of just how dreadful taste can be. It is not merely ...

A friend of mine kindly sent me the brochure of a conference of art historians that has just been held at University College, London, which claims to be one of the best academic departments of art history in the world. This claim naturally put me in mind of a line from a poem of Gerard Manley ...