Author: Andrei Navrozov

 The more I travel in Italy, the more often I think that my original choice of cloister – Palermo – may have been the outcome of a rushed decision, like getting married to the girl next door with whose father you liked going fishing.  The Sicilian capital has nearly a million inhabitants, and the fact is that cities all over the world do not get better when they get bigger. Admittedly, Italian social organization provides an antidote to urban sprawl which is not found elsewhere, in that within every city, even one as large as Rome, there are dozens, sometimes...

All my philosemitic friends love this joke, so I’m going to tell it without fear of infamy.  The fact is, this is only my second joke in 156 posts, and I have a good sense that by now the gentle reader may well be more tired of my own humor than of other people’s. 

 I was raised in a world of sedentary feats, in a cultural microcosm which deliberately undervalued experience.  More than that, it treated experience as a kind of monstrous blemish upon the face of thought, a defect that was deemed the more ungainly for being the more noteworthy, unexpected, or rare

In summertime one eschews politics.  The blazing sun doesn’t tolerate reflection; one is already plenty hot under the collar; and the wiles of politicians are as nothing when at last you plunge into the emerald sea.  Still, out of the corner of your eye you note things from that other, autumnal world, promising yourself to think about them at greater length once the days get shorter.

A poor man is not one who, with $100 in the bank, thinks himself poor.  A truly poor man, when he has $100 to his name, thinks himself rich, at least until something untoward happens to quash this euphoric delusion.

I was here for a single weekend, most of it spent outside London at a friend’s house in Hampshire – gin-and-tonics on the lawn, roast lamb on Sunday, a parade of wellington boots in the room adjoining the kitchen, in short, English country life at its most recognizable – but an evening in London did the devil’s work of adumbrating the shape of evil