Category: Feature

Children, generally speaking, are not wiser than their parents, and it cannot ever be said that pupils are much cleverer than teachers, but it is a manifest truth that newspaper editors are always stupider than newspaper readers.  In fact, reading a newspaper invariably conjures up in my mind the image of a large department store where the customers, who are ordinary people possessed of the usual medley of human qualities, are served by moronic salesgirls, automatons with the dual setting of surly or flirty. In England I read the Daily Mail, of which there is no longer an equivalent in...

A physiognomic peculiarity of Viktor Zolotov, who until last week and for the past 13 years had been head of Russia’s presidential bodyguard, is that he is a Doppelgänger of the man he was charged with protecting from enemies foreign and domestic.  Dogs sometimes grow to look like their owners, and evidently this applies not only to old ladies’ poodles, but to guard dogs as well.  The German word I’m using, incidentally, meaning a body double, is not so much pretentiousness on my part as consciousness of an historical rhyme. If Zolotov is a Putin clone, what used to be...

The fable of the grasshopper and the ant, attributed to Aesop, is seminal to Western culture with its cult of human industry.  Where a Russian or an Indian finds room and reason for relying on God or fate, an Englishman or a Frenchman hearkens to the moral of the fable, which miscasts fatalism as indolence and insouciance as folly.  Dostoevsky’s Karamazov brothers, in consequence, step aside in this culture to make room for TV’s Kardashian sisters, as even the most intimate details of one’s private life’s take on the configurations of ardent toil. The English language is largely blind to...

I signed off last week’s post with the observation that rehabilitation – especially the posthumous kind – is a bribe that legality slips to justice, and since then I’ve read a little of the story of St. Joan of Arc, illustrating my point rather neatly.  It may be remembered that, a quarter of a century after they had burned her at the stake in the marketplace at Rouen, the woman in question was exonerated on appeal by the Inquisitor General.  A quarter of a century, it seems – in other words, a generation – is how long it usually takes,...