It is many years since I retired from medical practice, but even in those days I had many illegal immigrants among my patients. They had claimed asylum, and most of them were indeed fleeing from personal situations, not usually of political persecution, that were deeply unpleasant. In my view they ...
Living between France and Britain, I am struck both by how different and how similar they are, the differences obvious and the similarities underlying. Chief among the underlying similarities is the imperative need for, and the simultaneous complete impossibility of, reform. The need is economic, ...
For the first time in my life, I have been a shopkeeper—admittedly for no more than a few hours, but I found it a curiously intense experience. It was not an ordinary shop, either, but that of Chinese antiquities and furniture, as well as of carefully selected ornaments and knickknacks, chosen ...
The poet A.E. Housman once wrote a poem about the impossibility of ignoring reality by means of permanent intoxication. The short poem ends: But men at whiles are sober And think by fits and starts, And if they think, they fasten Their hands upon their hearts. In other words, everyone is aware of ...
No one likes to be swindled, even if only of a sum easily affordable to him, for it is a personal humiliation. One has been taken for a fool. Recently, I wanted to book online a room in a hotel in a city in the South of France. It was in one of those chain hotels in which the rooms are precisely ...
The only interesting question for me about insurance, health, or otherwise is whether the insurance companies or their clients are the more dishonest. No doubt there is a dialectical relationship between them; I have always rather casually supposed that insurance companies don’t really mind ...
Consider the humble bus queue, what it tells us. People line up waiting for a bus to arrive and sometimes are disappointed because the bus is so full that there is not room for all of them. If the driver says that there is room for only five, it is the first five in the line who get on. No one ...
I confess (if I may use the word in this context) that I had little regard for the late pope. I took against him, as it were, early in his papacy when I saw his reaction to some Muslim outrage (or outrage committed by a Muslim), whose precise nature I now forget. The pope was in an airplane on ...
My reaction to world affairs veers between complacency and panic. Either it is the end of the world, or everything will continue as before. I have been through enough world crises to know that not all of them end in catastrophe; it does not follow, however, from the fact that I have so far always ...
