Category: Wednesday’s Child

I am writing this from Munich, a place known universally since September 30, 1938, for democracy’s sacrifice of strategic interest — or honor, for that is what strategic interest is in the life of individual or nation — to tactical advantage. The advantage, during the next few weeks or months, would benefit a politician, Chamberlain, and his party; the sacrifice, in the course of the century, would mean the death of hundreds of millions and half of Europe in chains. Before going any further, however, I should like to apologize for this choice of subject.  I had been hoping that...

Replying last week to a thoughtful reader’s question, I wrote some nasty things about a hierarch of the Russian Church. Basically, I said the gentleman was a bad egg. Looking back at that exchange, all sorts of thoughts run through my mind, some more conciliatory than others. The curate’s egg – forgive me for repeating a 1895 story from Punch that everyone must know by now – may have been bad, but the polite curate said to the bishop who was giving him lunch that it was good in parts. Isn’t just about every human being on earth a curate’s...

A fascinating document is circulating in cyberspace. As it is in my mother tongue, there’s little point in directing my readers to a specific link, but those among them who read Russian can easily find it by using Yandex or any other search engine that accepts Cyrillic. The author’s name is Sergei Grigoryants. I had already left Russia when, in 1975, the dissident was arrested by the KGB and sentenced to five years in prison for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” under Article 70 of the Khrushchev-era Soviet Penal Code which took up where Article 58 of the Stalin-era Penal Code...

In the commotion, here and elsewhere, caused by my “Putin’s Hitler” last month, some words of doubt got misplaced – chiefly I mean readers questioning my contention, with which I had prefaced this post a week earlier, that Russia’s got money enough to burn, to say nothing of buying Crimea, if not Kiev.  I admit to certain capriciousness in my choice of Exhibit A, namely, a bill for 107,524 Euros paid by a party of young Russians lunching at a seaside restaurant in France; in the past few weeks, however, somewhat less fanciful proof has been adduced, and this I...

Two ladies, long past the first bloom of youth and recently arrived in what Russian wits call the Age of Balzac, are scrutinizing the map of Palermo in the bar on the ground floor of my apartment building. They turn the map this way and that, like two army recruits conspiring to desert in the middle of a dense and inhospitable forest supposedly traversed by a national frontier, and from the air of anxious isolation about them I gather they are American tourists. The bar’s proprietor, Carmelo, is enthroned at the cash register not two feet away.  Nothing would be...

  In English we signal everyman randomness by speaking of Tom, Dick, and Harry, with the French it’s “Pierre, Paul or Jacques,” while the equally boring Russians employ the common surnames “Ivanov, Petrov, Sidorov.”  But when the Italians, God bless their intractable little souls, want to do the same, they speak of “Tizio, Caio e Sempronio,” that is to say, Titus, Gaius, and Sempronius.  Just imagine how that would trip off the tongue:  “If he thinks I’m gonna let every Titus, Gaius, and Sempronius use the new lawnmower, he’s got another thing coming.” When I first came to Palermo some...

If I were asked to devise a novel “ontological proof” of God’s existence, in the tradition of St. Anselm and the rest of that crowd, I would probably begin by pointing out the difference between the price of a yard of cashmere tweed and a yard of blue denim.  Hierarchies exist and, despite society’s attempts to erode or invert them, are demonstrable and immutable, which suggests that some kind of apogee of the natural order of things must exist in its turn. Though our society seeks to level the field, so that a fur must now be qualified as “real”...