Category: Andrei Navrozov

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.

Wasting time, as one does perusing the newly released JFK files, may yield the bonus of a walk down memo lane.

Identifying motives, however, is easier said than done. To begin with, many are mixed, so jealousy rarely comes without love and envy, while purest greed may be adulterated with altruism.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has done a great disservice to commonsense thinking by making his sleuth preternaturally observant.

To add substance to the rumors ventilated in comments on last week’s post to the effect that I lead a carefree life of dolce far niente, I can reveal that I pass most of my waking hours in bed.