I was sitting in a New College quad, chatting with two habitués of HiLo, the Jamaican speakeasy that, in response to my post last week, a reader has playfully – and, on reflection, not wholly inaccurately – likened to this site.  The boys were both blond, affable, eloquent, and almost preternaturally polite, though obviously I was only too aware of their capacity for nocturnal Jekyll-and-Hyde mutation into what in England is called Hooray Henrys, drunken young men in black tie who vomit into public fountains and never tire of mocking their more scholarly peers. I asked the boys to...

  Life under a Kafkaesque socialist bureaucracy may have its good points, but clarity of mind is not among them.  Opposite the main entrance to New College, where in spite of having no visible moth damage to my sweater and coat I’d been mistaken for an academic and given a few nights’ shelter, is a Japanese restaurant. I was perusing the menu in the window to while away the time before my son arrived, and this read as follows: “(P) indicates suitable for pescatorians (fish eating vegetarians); (V) indicates suitable for vegetarians (no meat, no fish); please note that many...

Readers may recall how, in a post at the beginning of March, I unveiled before them a portrait of absolute evil in the shape of a voluble blonde.  My model for the portrait was Russian, which is hardly surprising, as ours is the land of the Great Purge and, years before that, of atrocities against humankind that make present-day savagery in Syria and Iraq seem like postprandial deliberations in the House of Lords.  Beheading is execution; stuffing mouths with shards of broken glass, as the Bolsheviks liked doing in the Crimea in 1919, is gratuitous cruelty; and between the two...