Flies are like sheep: They seem to follow their leader, without it being clear which of them is their leader. This was my conclusion from watching flies approaching the flypaper I hung in my bedroom recently. Our house in the country is invaded by insects every year, a different species, or at ...
When I saw video clips of the joyful toppling of statues of Bashar al-Assad, as well as the tearing from walls of his ubiquitous portrait, I wondered what it must be like to be a dictator and see images of yourself everywhere (not that I have any ambitions myself in that direction). Do you come to ...
You are old when the world has moved on beyond anything that you can understand or sympathize with. I am not referring here to technical advances that only an infinitesimal proportion of the population can ever understand, or to the blizzard of laws and regulations that leave even specialist ...
Speech is silvern, said the old proverb, but silence is golden; and notwithstanding the recent disgraceful attacks on free speech, I more often find myself longing for freedom from speech, for example on trains, than freedom of it. The banality of so much conversation, including my own, appalls me. ...
Some people keep reading matter in their lavatories, though whether for their own benefit or that of their visitors I have never been able to determine—nor have I ever asked. I suppose that it comes in handy if you’re constipated, though this is a problem from which, as yet, I have never ...
These days, people of supposedly high caliber, or at least of high position, have difficulty in distinguishing vehemence of expression from depth of feeling, or even of thought. I may on occasion have made that mistake myself, since none of us is perfect, but it is my impression that what was once ...
A long-lived creature from Mars, who had paid the earth visits over several centuries, would be very much struck by modern man’s thirst for, or indifference to, ugliness. He, she, or it would have noticed that, precisely at a time when humanity had more disposable income than at any other time in ...
I hold no brief for the tobacco companies and have no shares in them. I detest the habit, perhaps because my father smoked an evil pipe whose product had been well described by James I in his anti-smoking diatribe of 1604, A Counterblaste to Tobacco. It (my father’s pipe) emitted a “horrible ...
No one, I imagine, would include a speech by Donald Trump in an anthology of succinctness or political eloquence. Whether he is too lazy to organize his thoughts, or simply incapable of doing so, I cannot say; I can say only that if I were in his audience, I should be furious at his apparent ...
Whenever I hear the word equity, my heart sinks, though I won’t go as far as to say that I reach for my Browning. My irritation on hearing the word is recent, however: I don’t think I would have reacted the same way forty years ago, when it was rarely used outside the context of the law. Woke ...
