Young Nietzsche declared that tragedy was born from the spirit of music, but this proposition – as in the case of most nineteenth-century paradox mongers – may also be safely read in reverse.  Surely one can argue that music was born from the spirit of tragedy?  In fact, in an essay written a year earlier than The Birth of Tragedy, this is just what Nietzsche himself seems to have argued.  Anyway, my wife, who is a musician, agrees, which is why she told Mario’s father that what the boy needed was to be better acquainted with the idea of tragedy....

We had snow in Palermo for the first time in fifty years, and the young barman in a truck stop where I go for coffee whenever Signor Baldo, my provider of choice, is indisposed, finally spoke to me of something other than the weather. “You’re Russian,” he said, because that’s what I’d told him the day before. Then, in a confidential tone, as though imparting some lifesaving news, he continued:  “In Russia, you beat Hitler.”  I often wonder about what the average man knows.  Reading Russian viewer comments on YouTube the other evening, after watching some stupid police drama, I...

What’s next, a thoughtful reader was asking in reply to my musings last week, a ban on cotton?  Well, since toilet paper had been put forward the week before last as a candidate for the ban, I suppose cotton is not that far afield, but I would argue that books is something we need to look at more urgently.  And not just new books, either.  The burning of libraries, private as well as public, would surely send a powerful signal to paper producers all over the world to stop despoiling our natural habitat, at the same time providing vegan workshops...