Young people’s money woes are down to lack of education,’ said a headline to an article in the Observer of 30 March. Putting aside my dislike of the locution ‘down to,’ which strikes me, for reasons that I cannot quite explain, as extremely vulgar, it occurred to me that most young people’s money woes must surely be caused by a … [Read on]

A friend in France having recommended the film The Grand Budapest Hotel, I went to see it recently. Tastes evidently vary, even among friends. The film was a long and painfully extended joke about Central Europe that was not very funny to begin with and the script was completely without the wit that might just have carried off the original … [Read on]

Reading about the recent murderous explosions in Volgograd and their Dagestani perpetrators, I could not help but recall my only visit to Dagestan and its capital, Makhachkala. Although the Soviet Union no longer existed, it was not surprisingly still very Soviet in atmosphere: for it has proved easier to take a country out of the Soviet Union than the Soviet … [Read on]

Only once have I hit my wife and that was by accident. I was driving in Naples and a motor scooter swerve in front of my car, causing me to stop. At that moment a young man, a pedestrian, opened the rear door and grabbed my wife’s bag sitting, vulnerable, on the back seat. I turned to give him a … [Read on]

Le Figaro recently ran an article predicting that, by 2030, the British economy would be the largest in Europe. I felt a momentary spike of patriotic optimism: then I pulled myself together, and thought ‘If this is really true, so much the worse for Europe.’ I suppose that having been so accustomed to national decline ever since my birth (I … [Read on]

Sometimes I feel a little sorry for people in high public office. First they are photographed everywhere they go, then the picture editors choose the photos that show them at their worst. Mrs Clinton, for example, is always shown is if she were playing Lady Macbeth. Of course, there is an explanation for this other than the malice of picture … [Read on]

The late Neil Postman wrote a brilliant book titles Amusing ourselves to Death about the deleterious cultural effects of television. The author maintained that television was an intrinsically trivialising medium, that it made shallow whatever it touched, dissolving utterly the distinction between the important and the unimportant. Whether or not his thesis is true, whether or not a non-trivialising TV … [Read on]