Category: Wednesday’s Child

The Feast of St. Rosalia, which a couple of days ago was celebrated in Palermo for the 401st time since the Church had assigned it to the plague-curing Saint, is above all a noisy affair.

In a fit of nostalgia, which is another name for a moment of historical clarity, one may gaze into the distance that separates the Mitford sisters from the Kardashian sisters.

I am well accustomed to there being no money in the house, but recently something seems to have changed. In the old days I used to joke…

In the 1956 American musical comedy, The Girl Can’t Help It, the music promoter played by Tom Ewell gets the shock of a lifetime when the girl of the title, Jayne Mansfield, sings beautifully in the closing scene of the film.

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.