The Joy of Curmudgeonry

To read and find ugly a sentence such as “Personalised embodied narratives foreground the particularity of the everyday” requires no rare se...

The meaning of the word “potato” has hitherto remained largely unperverted, mostly because there has been little advantage in claiming “pota...

It is a curiosity of almost fathomless wonder that a pseudo-philosopher who professes the ultimate senselessness of words should be able to ...

An oft-used and potent defence for a downright stupid idea is the evoking of the name of the celebrated thinker who first advocated it.

Whenever the will of the people is expressed in a way that is displeasing to our political elite, it is described as a threat to democracy, ...

A humanist is a creature akin to a human, of whom it makes an object of superstitious worship, but for whom it has little sympathy.

If you wish to fathom the ills of modern society, a good place to start is sociology; and once you have learnt from this mistake, you can be...

Against what is usually said, it is not the Muslim but the Christian who must adapt to the reality of the Western order, in one way at least...

“Who do you believe?”, asks Polly Toynbee of The Guardian , echoing the question asked by a Mori Report to be published tomorrow. Hoping tha...

Most mornings I like to peruse the pages of the Süddeutsche Zeitung , which, like many a German newspaper, is refreshingly tedious, being th...

With this trick the attempt is to have something accepted as important, which, without special pleading, pomposity, and earnest mugging, wou...

If you wish to gain a true account of how moral principles might preserve integrity in politics, then there is no better person to ask than ...

“In diesen Tagen erinnert Europa manchmal an eine alternde Tante, die ihre zittrigen Hände um ihre letzten Juwelen legt, während ein Räuber ...

Any television-viewer who can comfortably out-think an aubergine, without having to rely on pen and paper, must wonder at the state of the I...

When one is stuck for a solution or an intelligent thought thereupon, and one would like to pretend otherwise; or when one is presented with...

The complexity of the modern world presents us with questions and doubts that would hardly have occurred in the minds of our forebears. For ...