Why do I write? The first answer that comes to mind is: “I don’t know.” On reflection, a second answer emerges with a gravelly croak, like a fat, patriarchal frog among pond lilies: “Because they pay me.” Even though, as anybody with half a brain will tell you, the money in the business of writing...

The cobbler’s son goes barefoot. This English proverb could almost serve to illustrate the entry for “paradox” in a dictionary of philosophy. The paradox of capitalism is that, instead of selling their souls to the devil, its adepts give them away for free. One would think that all those masters of the universe, well used...

Tomorrow, July 31, is a great moment in the history of British jurisprudence. Let me explain. If you believe, as do I, that our civilization is spiralling downward, you may agree that – here as in Britain or anywhere else in the West – courts of law are no different in this regard than apples...

Perhaps because I am myself an émigré, I have never “written on immigration,” which is almost a fulltime vocation for many a political commentator whose intelligence and nous are otherwise indubitable. The temptation arises when that perennially controversial issue cuts across others closer to my heart, such as the freedom of speaking one’s mind or...

Russia’s parliament – called the “Duma” in homage to parliamentary democracy under the Romanovs, an echo as incongruous in its own way as the hearkening of America’s deliberative assembly to the Senate of ancient Rome – is, of course, a misnomer. In fact, the body in question owes nothing to its imperial predecessor and everything...

“Since there has never been a great civilization without poetry,” writes Tom Fleming in the current issue of Chronicles, “we can say that European civilization has ceased to exist.” True enough, but if the day’s newspaper is any guide, I reckon the sainted editor is digging too deep. The English word “uxurious” was used, and...

An extensive survey last year by the pollster YouGov found that “21 percent of U.S. citizens believe that human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, and God did not directly guide this process.” That’s 1 in 5, a minority more marginal – to choose a random example – than the...

There is an Arabic condiment called zatar, a mixture of dry spices which is delicious on toasted bread sprinkled with olive oil. I buy it in the Edgware Road, an oasis of the Middle East in the gastronomic desert that is London. There are many brands, unpronounceable names punctuated with guttural stops one and all,...

When did World War II start? An American is entitled to think it started with the attack on Pearl Harbor, as, clearly, the world without the United States is only a world in part. But ask an Englishman, and he will say the world war began some two years earlier, when Britain declared war on...

I fell in love with Claridge’s long ago. It was not a passion based on intimate contact, as I was never rich enough to stay there habitually, but rather a platonic yearning for the unreachable ideal, a poet’s misty-eyed vision of the eternal beloved. I cared little that this was, apart from everything else, a...

Sephora, a multinational chain of cosmetics stores owned by the luxury behemoth LVMH, operates over 1700 branches in 30 countries worldwide, generating over $4 billion in revenue as of 2013. Their flagship emporium in the Champs Élysées in Paris attracts over six million people a year, and even the smallest town in Italy boasts a...

An evident characteristic of the neoconservatives is that they are forever seeing the light. Leon Trotsky, Martin Luther King, Leo Strauss, and George Bush are just some of the splendid aurorae that, in decades past, have shone upon them at the end of philosophical tunnels and through the clearings in political clouds. It’s just that...

Beware fields of endeavor with the surname “science” tacked on to their names. Astronomy, for instance, has done very well for itself without being called “astronomic science,” as have mathematics, chemistry, zoology. Even philosophy and psychology – and yes, even that bastion of grasping mountebanks, sociology – have managed to get along fine with just...

One of the advantages of living is that, as some of those around you pass on, you get to tell funny stories about them – stories they wouldn’t necessarily have wanted told when still alive, vain, and touchy. The down side is that telling such stories rebounds on the storyteller. For instance, when, a couple...

Some years ago a friend of mine in Venice, whose family had been too influential during the Fascist years for anyone to doubt the source, told me a funny story about Vittorio Cini, an intimate of Mussolini’s. I recently found it corroborated in a memoir by Federico Zeri, the great historian of the Italian Renaissance...

It is by now a truism that, in politics today, opposites are converging. Starting out as specks on the underside of a Möbius strip, Europe’s Greens, anarchists, post-Marxist socialists, even a welfare-minded single mother or two, come out on top of the anti-EU agenda, mixing with Roger Scruton and his hunt, resplendent in their pinks,...

When you hear of something happening in the art world, what comes to mind? What vision does that combination of words, “art world,” conjure up? I will frame my next paragraph as the classic four answers to a multiple-choice quiz, if you don’t mind. A. A bunch of HIV-positive inverts, stuffing their faces with coke...

Every civilization is measured not by the culture it offers its denizens, but by the one it imposes upon them. So, though the Soviet 1920s harboured a Boris Pasternak, or, say, the American 1990s a Tom Wolfe, this will mean less to a future historian than, say, collective farms or electronic games. Electronic games had...

My sole-begotten son, who is midway through Oxford, is visiting me over the Easter holidays. He has brought along a friend from Brown, a classical archaeology major, and basically what the boys do all day long is get plastered. Which is as it should be, of course. When sober, the future archaeologist tells me about...

The duplex apartment overlooking the Trevi Fountain in Rome, where I spent a year in the 1990s, belonged – I say this without so much as a droplet of irony – to a very kind man by the name of Ernesto Diotallevi. It was only some months after I had terminated my tenancy that I...

“You are a stubborn bastard,” a Yale classmate of mine writes from the wilds of Virginia, where he, an Englishman, has been thrown by the hand of fate and now lives what I imagine as the life of an early colonist. “Your writing remains as difficult to penetrate as ever. Though,” he adds benevolently, “I admire...

Tony Benn, the politician formerly known as 2nd Viscount Stansgate, died last week at the reasonably ripe age of 88. He was one of the last honest men in a country regarded by her foes as perfidious and by her own people as steadfast, and lately described by a Russian cad as “a small island...

Reading all the various, though scarcely varied, opinions on the Ukraine “crisis” – after nearly 100 years of Russian misrule in Europe, one may think the word would be safely devalued, but no, they use it like St. James’s clubmen circa 1855 discussing the latest from Balaclava – one again becomes conscious of the political...

The Holy Grail of modern political journalism is a fallen dictator’s gold taps. Mind you, the bloodsucking hypocrite need not be actually dead when the assorted hacks and hackettes barge into what, until the new government sent out its press release, had been his bathroom; it is quite enough if the villain of the piece...