Just before the current troubles in Ukraine began, we called a plumber to our rented flat in Paris, which smelled of mold at the time. He was Ukrainian. He told us why he had left his native country a few years before: Everyone there was corrupt, nothing was possible without bribery, the opposition ...

People who were charged with a crime in England used to be told by the police that they did not have to say anything, but that anything they did say might be taken down and used as evidence against them. I think we should all be given this warning whenever we use a mobile telephone. Recently the ...

Why should the dying have all the best deaths? Fatal illness is not the only form of terrible human suffering: on the contrary, the briefest of reflection should be enough to convince anyone that such suffering is widespread and often long-lasting. Surely it is discriminatory to offer advantages, ...

When, half an eternity ago, I was a small boy who collected stamps, I was very favorably disposed toward King Farouk. I noticed that Egyptian stamps were never the same in taste or quality after his overthrow, and in those days I judged countries and their regimes by the taste and quality of the ...

Apart from pulp novels, airport bookshops often have an eccentric selection of books. A few years ago, for example, in the bookshop in the airport nearest my English home, I found a volume devoted to the last meals requested by men about to be executed in Texas. I suppose this was to persuade ...

It took me two attempts to visit the Musée de l"€™histoire vivante"€”the Museum of Living History"€”in Montreuil, in the suburbs of Paris. The first time, because I was with my wife, I went in a taxi. It was not an entirely wasted journey, even though when we arrived, the man at the gate ...

Hillary Clinton, so we are told, kept a spreadsheet devoted to her enemies, whom she rated on a scale of her own devising. I can"€™t say this surprised me: Mrs. Clinton doesn"€™t have a forgiving face. She is more Lady Macbeth than Cordelia (she would be wonderfully cast as the former), and ...

The temper of the times is often revealed by small details in newspapers, and that is why (I tell myself) I still read them, though it is common wisdom that they are on the path to extinction, as dinosaurs were after the great meteor hit the earth 65 million years ago. At any rate, I hope that they ...

According to a poll carried out by the Figaro newspaper, only 17% of the French believe that 2014 will be a good year, but in fact it started very well for France. Only 1,064 cars were burned by youths in the banlieues this New Year’s Eve"€”about a hundred fewer than last year. Who says ...

My late friend, the distinguished economist Peter Bauer, used to say that the only true unemployment in the modern world was among satirists, for the world had grown so ridiculous that what was intended as satire was either a description of what already existed or a prophecy of what would soon come ...