Man taunts history much the way he abuses nature, like a young delinquent at the zoo who is completely certain that the wild animal he’s teasing is secure in its cage.  Like nature, history is patient, shrugging off his foolish provocations, and only once in a while does it emit a deafening roar and rattle the bars of the cage.  Even more rarely, it breaks out, and then woe betide the arrogant trespasser.  Then Nero fiddles as Dresden burns, Castro smiles and strokes his beard as Lisbon is leveled by the earthquake, and Genghis Khan’s motorized divisions march on the...

  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...