When, a little more than 45 years ago, we arrived in the city of Peshawar from Afghanistan, it seemed a peaceful and romantic place. True enough, the Khyber Pass had not been safe to travel after dark, but the danger was from brigandage ...

The late Jean-Claude Duvalier, better known as Baby Doc, played only a small part in my life. I arrived in Haiti for the first time two years after his downfall, during the presidency of the eminently respectable academic, Leslie ...

I used to think that no one would ever again smell like my grandmother: that is to say, of naphthalene mothballs. She had them even in her handbag in case a moth was lurking there; the odor preceded her like a cold front on a weather ...

When I arrived in the city of Maiduguri nearly thirty years ago, everyone was away at the public executions. It was a ghost town until the spectators returned as from a football match in which the home team had won a decisive victory, ...

Yesterday a young woman who was unknown to me except at third hand died. She was the friend of a friend of my wife. Considering that I was personally unacquainted with her, and that there are about 1500 deaths a day in my country alone, ...

It is common for aging men, worn by the long years of drink and skirt-chasing and strenuous dissolution in the fleshpots of Asia, or any available fleshpots, to remember their youth in roseate hues that never were. But, dammit, we ...

Experts agree that 2013 was the most racist year since the one that started the Civil War. Everywhere you looked someone or something was being racist, even asparagus. Most of these ten commercials were from 2013, and they were all ...

"€™Tis the season of reminiscence and prognostication. Let's get the future out of the way first. I"€™ve made the same three predictions every January for the last thirty years: 1. Margaret Atwood will win the Nobel Prize in ...

As someone who's offended by nothing but annoyed by everyone, I found no shortage of people this past year to stoke the angry embers of my irascible soul. Try as I may to shield my eyes from the countless blinding petty indignities and ...

One of the pleasures of The Rolling Stones is that until recently they seem to have gotten by without a care for the bland pieties of the age. There have been no impassioned calls from them to end world hunger or get out of Iraq. ...

The unctuous pseudo-grief in the West after Nelson Mandela's death at the good age of 95 was to me nauseating in the extreme; it was so overdone that, though I am no Freudian, it raised suspicions in my mind of reaction formation, the ...

I recently sat down with a friend of more than fifty years, Reinaldo Herrera, and was filmed while lunching by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, also an old friend, discussing the past. The Herrera house is a grand one, on the ...