Category: Wednesday’s Child

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.

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…