2014

To adapt slightly the opening sentence of Kafka’s The Trial, someone must have been talking about me. I know this from all the advertisements and offers I receive unsolicited through the internet. Today came yet another offer of supposedly cheap burial insurance and then an e-mail suggesting that I should ‘Say hello to living confidently.’ At first sight, these two … [Read on]

Mr Cameron is Focus Group Man made flesh. This is not altogether surprising since his only known employment, other than politician, was in public relations. He appears not to know what to think until he has consulted a variety of gauges of public opinion, and then he announces his own opinion as if from deep conviction. First came his commitment … [Read on]

A friend of mine, who knew Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature and who died recently, sent me her reminiscences of her in their early days together in Johannesburg. This has prompted me to record my own reminiscences of her. I think I may fairly claim to be one of the few people … [Read on]

It is said that after the age of about forty the great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, read nothing except the Bible and newspapers. These days, alas, newspapers play an ever smaller role in the cultural role of any country. I don’t know a single young person who reads, let alone takes, a newspaper regularly. I say alas not because I … [Read on]

The French newspapers of late have reported clashes in Calais between different nationalities of ‘refugees’ camping there, preparatory to illegal entry into Britain. The French offer them advice as to how to claim asylum in France, but they are not interested in doing so. They want to get to England, their ‘promised land,’ according to the newspapers. According to my … [Read on]

What are British values, recently so beloved of Mr Gove? The question could quickly drive you mad. Apart from anything else, if the referendum in Scotland goes the wrong way, there will soon be no Britain for values to be British about. Are British values to be inferred from the conduct of present-day Britons (how I hate the abbreviation, Brits), … [Read on]

Success in indirection lies, wrote Emily Dickinson, but I think our age responds more to the explicit than to the implicit, at least in literature. Recently, for example, I read of the discovery and sale of the manuscript of Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-war poem Atrocities, published in 1919, in which Sassoon denounced the atrocities committed on the British side during the … [Read on]

Although football is hardly the American national sport, the New York Times ran more than one article about the German victory in the World Cup, with links to sites that explained the part that advanced technology had played in it. For example, physiological monitoring of the players in training allowed the manager to select those to play who were at … [Read on]