I’m writing this while sporting dark sunglasses in the style of Ray Charles, or maybe even of Milton, raised from the dead to headline an Armani eyewear advertising campaign.  The trouble with my eyes, apparently, is caused by age – Dr. Jeffrey Heier, a famous Harvard Medical School ophthalmologist, apparently, has published a treatise entitled The Aging Eye – but I confess I attach far greater symbolic significance to this, one hopes transitory, malady.  Indeed, why stop at Milton, when one up the stakes and can go for Homer? Technically the thing that’s been happening to my eyes is called...

A good case can be made for the futility of all arguments, starting with the domestic kind and ascending to the theological, but if one finds oneself debating the color of the sunset – which one’s opponent sees as mauve while it’s obviously purple – I suppose that’s life and no harm done.  It’s different when the subject is politics, something I haven’t argued about since university.  To be sure, I’ve made my views known in writing and in conversation, but a proper argument depends less on exposition than on rebuttals, which are used to corner the opponent and, if...

“I’ll have an espresso. No garlic, please.” What, does the gentle reader think that this is a foolish thing to add?  That it’s absurd and unnecessary?  Not in London it isn’t, because here anything’s possible.  I mean, the people here have invented something called a “double espresso,” which has no greater right to existence than a double car, a double umbrella or a double wife.  In Italy, if you want another coffee, you may ask for it, but the whole existential machinery of the thing is set up in such a way that a “double espresso” is patently a nonsense...