Wednesday’s Child: A Blind Spot
A diverting article in the New York Post, of all places, made me look back on nearly half a century of Western handwringing and eyerolling at the mention of the homeland I had lost long before I was born.
Author: Andrei Navrozov
Wednesday’s Child: A House of Sand
There’s a lot of dust in the house, visitors from abroad have on occasion admonished us, don’t we ever vacuum? Now, with the newborn child on hand, I fear the criticisms will sound yet more insistent and the excuses ever more feeble. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and by the way when are you planning to get the baby vaccinated?
Wednesday’s Child: An Old New Order
A university friend of mine, Peter Baldwin, whose book on the pandemic I mentioned here some months back, has just come out with another. The title is Command and Persuade: Crime, Law, and the State across History. Were I a libertarian, it would always sit on my bedside table, next to a tome of Ayn Rand and a sepia print of the Unibomber in a silver frame.
Wednesday’s Child: King Kongtext
I realize the above pun leaves much to be desired, but I was in an exceptionally jolly mood last week. I had come across a ridiculous article in The Atlantic which straightaway I knew would give my next post its subject and meaning, and the headline above it was “Vladimir Putin’s Waning Tolerance for Art.” Gosh, I thought, mentally addressing the author of the article, you say waning tolerance for art like it’s a bad thing.
Wednesday’s Child: Armenian Radio
The gentle reader may recall the series of posts in the spring of last year in which I argued that the pestilence is a biological weapon designed and launched deliberately to destabilize the West, where even a single death is a matter of public concern, by a totalitarian regime prepared to sustain such casualties in the millions especially when its own population is 1.4 billion.
Wednesday’s Child: The Tinder Box
Every time I look at a newspaper, I feel like the soldier in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale of the tinder box.
Wednesday’s Child: Base Notes
I am not writing this on pagan Lemuria or on what to the Catholics in Italy is Ognisanti, in other words, on All Saints’ Day, but apparently on what is now a Russian state holiday called Bailiffs’ Day.
Wednesday’s Child: Last but Not Least
The gentle reader would be rightly shocked if, after last week’s dramatic personal appeal in this space, his unruly correspondent changed tack and let fly with something about Russian shenanigans in West Africa.
Wednesday’s Child: The Glass Veranda
This week my wife is expected to give birth to our child. How can I not recall the moment in my beloved Pasternak’s Spektorsky, when the poet says….
Wednesday’s Child: Devil May Care and Does
As there is little hope that the gentle reader can recall a post of mine from four years ago, I will quote its closing paragraph. That week I had just returned from London from the funeral of a close friend where I came across an old acquaintance – novelist Sebastian Faulks, author of The Girl at the Lion d’Or and other light masterpieces – and this led me to reminisce about our last meeting many years earlier, at a Chinese restaurant of my choosing.
