The Joy of Curmudgeonry

“Every philosophy which believes that the problem of existence is touched on, not to say solved, by a political event is a joke — and a pseu...

“Whenever I have occasion to classify the persons I meet into three classes, ‘good, medium, bad’, I use a needle mounted as a pricker, where...

Liverpool is to be European Capital of Culture in 2008. One must charitably suppose that it is culture in the anthropological sense.

“Nothing of human concern is really outside psychiatry.” [1] In this universal purblindness, much of human concern is lost from sight, fall...

Anthropology is the study whereby for every bad idea proposed by Western sophisticates, there can be found a tribe of savages testifying to ...

Evil is very far from banal — it is exciting, intoxicating, and brings spiritual weight and animation to even the most mundane of tasks. If ...

The modern liberal — let us say it: the smug bourgeois — is fit only for comfort and cowardice. All his principles, ideals, values, and aver...

If we wish to know all about the age in which we live, we must also read the writings of those who died before it began, who knew nothing ab...

Fawney-scholars and frivolous mediocrities, in trivial and low-regarded fields of study, take seriously the work of promoting geniuses from ...

Be under no illusion: should a terrible and morbid regime be instituted tomorrow, all kinds of shabbiness will step out from the shadows of ...

Once the idea has arisen that all ideas are merely the accompanying shadows of various social classes, groups, races, etc, cast in the light...

A social-scientific study, in which participants viewed photographs of persons over the age of seventy in order to assess visual signs of ag...

“So far as there still survives anything of value from the Western tradition of humanistic studies, it is in spite of most of the people in ...

It is a great pity that J.B.S. Haldane, evolutionary biologist, co-founder of population genetics, and rather clever chap, was addled somewh...

Perhaps the efficiency of a process advances to such a stage at which it must decline on account of all the time it frees for bored fools to...

Relativism is the compliment that desperation pays to failing ideas.