I’m writing this on a terrace that overlooks cerulean infinity on three sides, yet a day here is costing me less than a cocktail, with an inevitable accompaniment of olives and roasted nuts, at the Cala di Volpe or any number of similarly fancy establishments dotting the map of Italy from the Costa Smeralda upwards
Not a kind word for him anywhere, East or West. They are calling him “Europe’s last dictator,” which only makes sense if neighboring Russia is a country in Asia, and every little French politician, every sniveling British journalist, every U.S. State Department flunky, and every Kremlin lackey are gloating over his political demise, which is said to be imminent. This coming Sunday, Belorussian elections may be won by a random female candidate who is capitalizing on the protest vote against the taciturn mustachioed incumbent, and I sincerely hope this grossly maligned man manages to falsify the result to stay in...
Of everything we are to take on faith as Christians, quite the most difficult thing to believe in is the immortality of the soul. Every human being is said to possess one, yet so much evidence to the contrary seems to pile up almost daily right in front of our eyes that only the best of men can see a way of eschewing doubt on that score
Today marks the twelfth day of hearings in the Royal Courts of Justice in London, where a Hollywood film star – the “Bad” of my title – is suing News Group Newspapers, publishers of the lowbrow and bestselling Sun, for libel.
Apparently there is a neurological disorder called prosopagnosia, also known as facial agnosia or “face blindness,” affecting to greater or lesser extent some two percent of the world’s population.
The barbarians are near, we feel their corrosive breath on our necks, and unlike their predecessors these new ones cannot be absorbed…
It is curious that Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase about speaking softly and carrying a big stick is the progenitor of “big stick foreign policy,” though in fairness it should really have given us a totally opposite doctrine, “speak softly foreign policy.”
A friend wrote that he had been lent a sailboat and would be moored in Venice over the weekend, and would I want to dine in his company? With the insouciance born of longstanding habit I replied that I would with pleasure, if only he coughs up the money I need to get there
In today’s totalitarian Russia, women are in the vanguard of political repression, and the funny thing is that, were I to paint portraits of some of them, the gentle reader would doubtless be able to relate their traits to his own experience and recognize in one of them the figure of the woman who runs the music department of a college near his house…
Do black lives matter? Clearly, if the story of the Rwandan genocide to which I alluded here a couple of weeks ago is any indication, they do not.
