I was married once.  Twice, actually.  No, just the once, really, because the union had been annulled before I married again for the second or, rather, the first time, on the legal grounds of mutual and substantial misunderstanding.  In reality, just then I had met the woman who would become my second or nearly first...

Lebanese restaurants in London used to position their shawarma near the front window, so that a passerby could always tell the time of day by the volume of the orotund mass of diced lamb remaining on the spit.  Now that many of them have become gentrified, that traditional enticement has been replaced with potted palms...

There are two archetypes of the charming idler.  One, rather like myself, is likely to be unemployed de métier.  The other drifts in and out of employment, trading on social connections, borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, pandering, dealing cocaine, walking dogs, selling Impressionist pictures, joining the Foreign Legion, working on a perpetuum mobile, discovering...

It may seem to the least demanding of readers that this column, though generously meandering of thought, is short of action.  The trouble, I must admit, is that I have no sense of perspective.  There may well be more references to current events in a couple of pages of Plato’s Dialogues than in everything I...

All one can ever imagine of Eve is the fig leaf, but the whole issue is more universal, and at the same time somehow more prickly, than any isolated contretemps in the Legoland of the senses.  Say “glutton,” and in your mind’s eye you’ll see a mutton joint being brandished by some Rabelaisian hand; say...

The world of pulp and prevarication, whose deluged plateau the young woman I was in love with had fled, called to mind a private letter of Pasternak’s written in the 1920’s.  There the poet described the icy slush of totalitarianism, emulsifying every existing object out of recognition, as the epochal substratum in which his kind...

The riddle of Svengali is only a riddle because men, in particular, tend to caricature their position as the breadwinning yang with respect to the theatrical female yin, supposing that what lies on the far side of the sexual divide is love, while what lies to this side of it is money.  But the idea...

On a balmy spring day, a visitor to St. Mark’s in Venice, if he is adventurous enough to make his way to the top of the cathedral and look down, will see the subjacent piazza covered in a species of vermin.  Excoriating the global tourist is almost as banal a pastime as trailing through an...

In the spiritual suburbia whose probable attitudes to various emotional predicaments I imagine in these diaries, men tend to pride themselves on their rationalism and are much less interested in the alchemy of feeling than women, as shown by audience-share breakdowns of soap operas and by the proportion of romantic subject-matter in women’s magazines.  “Love,”...

I said I had fallen conditionally in love, and now anyone apart from myself would have paused to wonder what on earth, if anything, this awkward phrase could possibly mean.  “Great!  A penniless foreigner, a writer courting failure, a serial adulterer running off with an American teenager!  He has a condition to make, would you...

On the pavement flank of the café, my field of vision was being traversed, with the quiescent regularity of Attic horsemen galloping along the circumference of a drinking vessel, by strange women.  Making their way up the Fulham Road, past the famous cinema, some of them moved in little groupings, like schools of gamboling goldfish;...

I had fallen in love with Italy because she was my twin, my mirror image, my other half.  Like me, she wanted to sit between two chairs, to have her torta della nonna and eat it, too.  She sought to arrest the dissolution of society by progressive, that is to say capitalist, fictions; yet she...

Photography is a mongrel art, half applied, half found.  But then the world we live in is a mongrel world, a hybrid that fuses extant custom and tradition—including, for instance, the constitutional principle of limited government—with the emergent totalitarianism which, as Huxley noted in his Preface to Brave New  World, would always assume innovative and...

Off the back of the little three-wheel ladybug-shiny truck in front of the house, parked under an exuberant tree to which one of the neighbors had attached a washing line, early this morning I bought two yellow melons, three kilos of Muscat grapes, two kilos of late, hillside peaches, a kilo each of plums and...

The desire to spit is widely underrated as a motive.  Yet it was known throughout the university I attended, for instance, that the founder of Pan American Airways, one of its illustrious and discontented alumni, had built the PanAm skyscraper over Grand Central Station in New York with the single-minded purpose of being able to...

Death is terribly tactful.  It comes to a man when he finally realizes that he understands nothing, thus saving his face.  Watched back to front, like the videocassette that you know is on fast rewind when you see the hooker paying the client, life is a gradual shedding of obsolescent platitudes, a quiet letting go...

Coincidence is the smile of luck, but it is also the laughter of misfortune.  A smile is singular, rather like tears; it appears meaningful insofar as it seems to have a precipitant cause.  Laughter, by contrast, is repetitive and mechanical; automatons may laugh, but they can scarcely be imagined smiling.  Thus, hysterical laughter is common...

The poor smelled, and there was nothing to be done about it.  “Middle-class people believe that the working class are dirty,” George Orwell recalled, “and, what is worse, that they are somehow inherently dirty.”  His childhood nightmare was having to drink from a vessel touched by the lips of a presumed social inferior. I had...

It is all very well, strolling arm in arm through the hothouse of gloriously midsummer fiction, snatching a vermouth and bitters in the shadow by Fouquet’s, hailing a taxi some gilded moments later; it is all very well when you have the money to get yourself to Paris, to pay for the perfumed drinks, to...

The Ritz Club, the casino arm of the venerable and resplendent hotel in Piccadilly, is, for the discriminating player with an 18th-century sense of what gambling is all about, “the other place.”  Apart from the late John Aspinall’s hallowed sepulchre in Curzon Street, this subterranean alhambra is the only privately owned gambling club in London. ...

If I seem to have become obsessed with the isomorphism of love and gambling, it is because, like an unexpected number in roulette on a particularly hazardous night, the subject just keeps coming up.  Wherever I look, whether to a work of imaginative literature or to a story from real life, at once I note...

Once, a long time ago, when, as a result of one of those complex misunderstandings that cast long shadows over the course of my life, I was getting married in a small town in Connecticut, my father showed up at the church stuffed with promotional literature.  This consisted of leaflets describing his new organization, donation...

“Let us gamble with reason in the name of life,” urges Pascal in his celebrated statistical proof for the existence of God.  “Let us risk it, for the sake of a win that is infinitely great and just as probable as the loss, which is to say nonexistence.”  With the cynicism of an inveterate gambler,...

The greatness of man, writes Pascal in his Pensees, is great so long as man is conscious of his own insignificance.  “A tree, by contrast, is not conscious of its own insignificance.”  In other words, man feels his insignificance; he is aware of it; and he is made great by his awareness of it.  “But...

I was reared in a cultural microcosm that undervalued experience.  More than that, it treated experience as a kind of monstrous blemish upon the face of thought, a defect that was deemed the more unfortunate for being the more noteworthy, unexpected, or rare.  It was as though the threadbare commonness of climbing the Himalayas, or...