
The problem of loneliness seems to be growing. New research demonstrates many gardeners these days have a more intimate relationship with the blooms in their borders, rockeries, pots, and window boxes than they do with most other actual humans. A newly publicized Australian study has claimed that one in seven plant owners now possess a “deep love” for their items of greenery, enjoying “highly connected” relationships with them to the extent of considering them their family members. As many as 42 percent of those questioned admitted to being “emotionally attached” to their ...
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 ...
I didn’t sense much enthusiasm for the formal 80th-anniversary celebrations of VE Day across Britain last week, at least not amongst the young. How to combat this alarming apathy? Over in America, ...
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 ...
A number of own goals by the Trump administration led to Democratic resistance finally stiffening in April. Yet Trump’s impressively aggressive war on wokeness continues to ...
Strange news from the Czech Republic (or Czechia, or Czech-Land, or World of Czechs, or whatever the place has decided to call itself this month), where a colony of beavers have ...
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 ...
"Climate change will make earth a living hell!" claims popular astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I don't believe him. The media say, "All Arctic ice will soon melt away! ...
This week marks eighty years since the death of Mussolini on 28 April 1945. All the more surprising, then, that he is currently Italy’s reigning Man of the Year. The ...
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 ...
Amid the boredom of a non-Christian pope's death and the media's obsession with the Signal messaging app, I found myself reading about Pearl Harbor this week. It seems that as ...
Directing a film is a little like coaching a football team—both are jobs for natural leaders of men—but strikingly few auteurs played serious team sports after age 18. Ron ...
When I was still a boy, there was a saying, now rather out of fashion, used by critics to blast politicians or other figures of authority whenever they had formulated yet another ...
How is it possible to “sexually harass” a statue? You’d have to ask Dublin City Council, who have just declared an innovative new experiment in protecting a supposedly ...
A French antiquarian bookseller from whom I buy books from time to time sends them to me through the post with old-fashioned postage stamps on the packet. How pleased I am when I ...
Did I ever tell you my favorite memory from the George Floyd riots of 2020? I live-tweeted about it at the time, but since my X account was nuked, I suppose I can tell the tale ...