Author: Andrei Navrozov

Last week I spent an evening with an abstemious friend, and of course this was hard on the nerves. I made short shrift of a bottle of cognac by the time the night was over.

Slowly is how things happen, especially the things one dislikes.

I have always believed that peace on earth is an enemy of intellectual freedom, a morass of philistine life wherein ideals and principles sink into compromise and appeasement…

Last week I sought to enlarge on an insight of Anthony Powell’s, arguing that individual liberty is something of a hermetic communion like serious literature.

My father used to tell me how, when he was a boy in the 1930’s, he came upon a cobbler plying his craft in Moscow. The man was an Azeri, quietly industrious like many of his race and, just as important, perennially sober.

The year 1931 was when Stalin’s “collectivization” reached an apogee. In 1928 the policy was yet in embryo, with most peasant farms still in private hands…

I have often regaled myself with the thought of suffering from what, by my own lights, would be an aristocratic disease – asthma, gout, and various other chronic ailments…

Living so beguilingly close to the epicenter of progress as the gentle reader is, he need not be told of its joys, one of which is waiting on hold when telephoning a commercial enterprise.

Nikola Tesla, who could have been the protagonist of Down and Out in Paris in London had Orwell been an engineer of genius, invented, among his countless futurist follies, remote control.