One of my few remaining ambitions is to catalog my library—if that is not too grand a word for my accumulation of books. Certainly, I have known municipal libraries with fewer volumes, especially now as they can’t wait to dispose of those encumbrances and obstructors of computer terminals. After my death, what Victorian graveyards would once have ...
When someone is said to be lacking in ambition, it is usually meant as a criticism, as if people had a transcendent moral duty to be ambitious. How else but by ambition will mankind advance? I grant that ambition is sometimes, or ...
Our cleaning lady in France brings her dog with her. The dog has been a great solace to her during a difficult stage in her life. She bought her from a breeder who used her as a mother of puppies, but since she (the dog) was well past ...
Some years ago, in Australia, I appeared on a platform with a prominent intellectual, many times more famous than I. We were asked what it took to be good. The famous intellectual, who had had a brilliant career, answered that in order ...
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 ...
One of the more fascinating scholarly oeuvres of the 21st century is economic historian Gregory Clark’s planned trilogy of books with bad Hemingway puns for titles. In 2007 came Clark’s speculations on the causes of the Industrial ...
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 ...
Two weeks ago I wrote about the folly of viewing “I’m fleeing to a red state” as a panacea rather than a postponement, and last week I dealt with the right’s disdain for details and fondness for “paint with a wide brush” ...
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 ...
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 ...
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