From the October 1998 issue of Chronicles. When, after a stint in the British Army which left him crippled for life, Auberon Waugh went up to Oxford in 1959, by his own admission he knew nothing of the place apart from what he had read in his father’s novel, Brideshead Revisited, describing the Oxford of...

A reader had written in to reproach me for “punching down” in a recent post, and on reflection I can find no reason to disagree. I like fruit that hangs low, the kind that weighs down the branches until it is within grasping distance; in fact, from childhood I remember that apples on the ground...

A singer by the name of Masha Rasputina, who, when a good deal younger and not quite as surgically enhanced, used to thrill nascent Moscow bourgeoisie by appearing on stage in latex lingerie, has just recorded a new song. A few minutes’ research shows that the words, or “lyrics” as these banalities are known the...

There’s a young lad who has been called the Barack Obama of Britain, and this may be indictment enough for many of my enlightened readers, but it is his actual name, rather than what he has been called, that fascinates me. As my readers may remember, I’m obsessed with onomatomancy; of the 163 known forms...

A tooth I had been neglecting lashed out at me last week like a woman scorned, and through clenched teeth I can report that only renal colic hath more fury. I remembered the time they gave me morphine in a London hospital, after an evening’s attempt at drinking two cases of champagne in the company...

With less than a month before Britain’s general election, a squib on the subject is apposite. As a sometime betting man, I can share the news that the Conservatives are presently at 4/9 and Labour is on 13/8, with the bookmaker Betfair putting the chances of a Conservative coalition government, such as their present arrangement...

My two score years in the West have led me to conclude that, of all the factors impeding the political thinking of its elites, few are more pernicious than the set of prejudices amalgamated with the notion of “conspiracy theory.” Last week in this space the estimable Tom Piatak wrote that, in American politics, “being...

I’ve been watching, spellbound, a German documentary released in the wake of the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland. It’s entitled Sudeten Deutschland kehrt heim (“German Sudetes Come Home”), and I’m going to gloss over the debating point – delicious, though I trust a trifle too obvious for my discerning readers’ taste – of this being...

“The truly apocalyptic view of the world,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein, “is that things do not repeat themselves. It is not absurd to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately...

Increasingly I find myself in the position of the dissident in an old Soviet joke, protesting against the regime on a street corner by handing out leaflets. A passerby takes one, sees that it’s a blank sheet of paper, and asks why there are no words. “Who needs words?” counters the protester. “Isn’t it all...

Last Wednesday I wrote in this space that Chechnya’s strongman Ramzan Kadyrov put pay to my own feeble attempts at black humor when he said there was “not the slightest doubt” that the assassination of Nemtsov had been the work of the Western secret services. Since then the joke has grown even funnier – so...

What is it with people? Offing themselves like death’s going out of fashion! First Litvinenko poisons himself with green tea in a sushi restaurant in the middle of London and blames radioactive polonium. Then Berezovsky strangles himself with a scarf and drags his own corpse to the bathroom to make some kind of political point....

The House of Lords European Union Committee is chaired by Lord Tugendhat. I don’t know anything about the man, and it may well be that his is a noble title going back to the Battle of Hastings, but I think most people will agree it’s one hell of a funny name. Then there’s Nigel Farage,...

Being consistent has the consequence of being predictable, a quality welcome, perhaps, in husbands and dogs, but somewhat a defect in journalists – at least as far as their readers, desirous of truth yet relentless in pursuit of variety, are concerned. Those who have followed my political commentary in these posts – next Wednesday, as...

There once was a minor poet, writing in Russia in the 1920’s, who had been educated at the University of Heidelberg yet never acquired the airs of a German pedant. I recently ran across a short fable of his, and threw together an English version of it because the eight lines seemed such a concise...

The French government has approved a budget of some half a billion dollars to finance new initiatives against terrorism. Among the early fruits of this campaign is an “infographic,” or poster in plain English, headlined “Radicalisation Djihadiste, les premiers signes qui peuvent alerter” (“Jihadist Radicalization: First Warning Signs”). A top telltale sign of a person’s...

We men of good will had a little scare last week when it was announced that the Sun – a venerable British newspaper whose prose style makes America’s National Enquirer sound like an excerpt from a late Henry James novel read by a young Laurence Olivier – would bow to political pressure and axe Page...

Begun in 1879 under the auspices of the University of Oxford and published in 1928 by Oxford University Press, A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, now better known as the Oxford English Dictionary, is one of the greatest events in the history of Western civilization. What is not widely remembered is that the lexicographer...

Irony has been in the news these past few days, when a couple of guys not only refused to share a Frenchman’s joke at the expense of the Prophet Mohammed, peace and blessings be upon him, but actually gunned down the joker– along with a dozen of his cronies, for good measure. For comparison I...

Today, as it happens, is Christmas Day in the Orthodox calendar, and so, instead of carrying on with the holiday marathon of Manlio Orobello’s Lays of Sicilian Life, I thought I would pause and take stock. A new year has just wafted in, after all, to whispers of the first snowfall in Palermo since 1956,...

“A professor of engineering I knew, a specialist in reinforced concrete, was a man who showed me a great deal of kindness at what was obviously a difficult stage of my life. Construction is a prime mover of our region’s economy and the focus of all sorts of interests, not all of them benign, but...

“Apart from an eleventh-century Norman castle, my birthplace, latterly a town of some ten thousand inhabitants, is famous for having once had as many as a hundred churches in its precincts and for the way our people have with mutton. I had somehow lost track of the place, which I had left when still very...

“The problem with having a car is that one gets into accidents. However trifling, these may have unexpected consequences. “One bright winter day my bumper grazed a pedestrian, who promptly fell to the ground. I got out to make sure he was all right, which he said he was, but all the same I offered...

In the 1980’s my father wrote extensively of the distribution of mental resources in the West, comparing its patterns with those of the Soviet model. In my own turn I took up the subject in several newspaper articles, as well as a book, in the 1990’s. To my mind, frankly, it remains the question of...

Detecting hypocrisy, among other faults, in the conduct of another is a perilous enterprise, as Christ reminds us in the allegory of the mote and the beam. It’s a bit like reprimanding somebody for bad manners, which is worse manners. And, not dissimilarly, finding impiety in a minister of the Gospel is, more often than...

Last week the British government stopped considering the usual trifles – Ukraine, ISIS, UKIP, the budget deficit, as well as the unsurprising news that, now according to Forbes, America’s nuclear arsenal is a pile of rusting junk – and turned to the vital affairs of state, notably the urgent need to block the entry into...

Four years ago, when, from the relative safety of my Sicilian bolthole, I was writing a weekly column for Snob, then still a leading organ of Moscow’s bien pensants, a strange thing happened. I published a column entitled “A Tale of the Future Man,” describing in some detail an openly sourced Russian government document I...

“Any incidence of offense or insult directed against the Soviet Union or its institutions, irrespective of where the incident may take place (in the street, in a shop, at the theater or cinema, or elsewhere), must be reported immediately to a senior supervisor at the Soviet embassy or consulate. In the event such offense or...

“When I was arrested, they brought me to the newer of the two prisons, which is by far the less comfortable. At the old prison, when an inmate has meetings – with a visitor, a psychiatrist, a lawyer – he is conducted across an inner courtyard, with a lawn in the middle and trees all...

My mind having regained, in the wake of last week’s contretemps in the airport queue, some of its former suppleness, I turned to the November issue of Chronicles, with its theme of “Politics as Reality TV.”  There I was smitten at once by Tom Fleming’s editorial article, which, as one of the speechwriters he derides...

It was Chesterton, if I’m not mistaken, who said that nothing narrows the mind like travel. As I had to fly to London over the weekend, to collect some money that I was owed – my alleged debtor’s contrary view notwithstanding – I had ample opportunity to be reminded of this bon mot. Airports! Why...

One day I got myself lost in what was a very small town. It was an afternoon in late spring, and the sun was beginning to bake. I was walking through a labyrinthine part of the town, having followed a twisting road that was taking me nowhere. There was not a living soul in sight....

Manlio Orobello, one of my oldest and truest friends in Sicily, has dictated his memoirs to me. The result is a book of some eighty stories, written in English and entitled From Round Here: Lays of a Sicilian Life. It occurs to me that it may be diverting to publish, at some future juncture, two...

The Independent Orders of Zhukov, Lenin, and October Revolution Red Banner Operational Purpose Division of Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia – yes, my friends, there is such a thing – has just been given back its old name.  Now it will again be called the Felix Dzerzhinsky Independent Orders of...

“Why go to the Greek islands? Why go to Greece? Why not sit for a few minutes under a sunlamp, nip over to the supermarket for a slab of plasticized feta, and get some sirtaki going on your iPod?” The question is not entirely rhetorical, I said to Andreas. With his wife Evagelia, Andreas Petrakis...

Russians have bragged to themselves about their souls for ages, but for the past hundred years or so – roughly since Nietzsche discovered Dostoevsky, Henry James discovered Turgenev, H. G. Wells discovered Tolstoy, and the assorted Bloomsbury folk discovered Chekhov – other European nations, Britain foremost, have been pitching in as well. The dubious outcome...

In my childhood there was a soi-disant “Armenian” joke that we used to tell, and it went more or less as follows. Is it true, one Armenian asks another, that Sarkisyan won a million in the state lottery? “Yes, it’s true,” replies the other Armenian, “but it wasn’t in the state lottery, it was at...

In one of my posts earlier this month, Pasternak’s Zhivago came up, a scandal from the late 1950’s that resulted in the poet, by then long extinguished as the once-in-a-millennium genius he had been, receiving the Nobel Prize for a trivial and pusillanimous novel. The other day, coincidentally, a book sent to me for review...

I spent last weekend in Tuscany in what was once an abandoned seaside resort, now a glittering showcase for everything that is repugnant about global tourism. I leave out its name because the locals, though no less greedy and unprincipled than other people elsewhere on this venal planet, are hardly to blame for the discovery...

“She was vicious,” commented the Paris Match journalist Dany Jucaud. “She reduced the entire world to rich men wanting sex and poor women wanting money.” Jucaud was speaking of a famous brothel keeper, Madame Claude, to whose life and times the sycophant’s bible, Vanity Fair, devotes hagiographic attention in its September issue. “Her client list,”...