The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as ‘Fat Man and Little Boy.’) And a river...

What do you most value in your friends?Their continued existence.

In Sarajevo in 1992, while being shown around the starved, bombarded city by the incomparable John Burns, I experienced four near misses in all, three of them in the course of one day. I certainly...

I am not even an atheist so much as an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches and the effect...

In the early days of the December that my father was to die, my younger brother brought me the news that I was a Jew. I was then a transplanted Englishman in America, married, with...

I cannot forget the figures of Slobodan Milošević, Charles Taylor and Saddam Hussein, who made terrified fiefdoms out of their “own” people and mounds of corpses on the territory of their neighbours. I was glad...

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the land question in Zimbabwe is the single most decisive one.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that ‘other’ cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to...

You should be nicer to him,’ a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. ‘He has no friends.’ This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember,...

[I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form...

When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that ‘he may tarry,’ we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.

Playing pool with Korean officials one evening in the Koryo Hotel, which has become the nightspot for foreign businessmen and an increasing number of diplomats (to say nothing of the burgeoning number of spies and...

Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of...

Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven’t taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling).

karmic reassignment”) manages to fall slightly below the level of those undergraduate talk sessions. The Manichean stand-off leads Mailer, in closing, to speculate on what God might desire politically and to say: ‘In different times,...

Who but the sports-mad [Norman] Mailer would liken the battle between God and the Devil to a game of American football? The contest, for sure, has with [sic] own laws (so that after God and...

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly...

The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to the elements by the Communists, at least after they had briefly employed it as a ‘furniture...

This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII. At a point in the not-too-remote future, the stout heart of Queen Elizabeth II will cease to...

For all its outwardly easy Latin charm, Buenos Aires was making me feel sick and upset, so I did take that trip to the great plains where the gaucho epics had been written, and I...

As he once wrote of Kipling, his own enduring influence can be measured by a number of terms and phrases—doublethink, thought police, ‘Some animals are more equal than others’—that he embedded in our language and...

Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn’t present always. I mean, often what you’re meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you...

Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic...

Later on in Culture and Society, Williams scores a few points by reprinting some absolutist sentences that, taken on their own, represent exaggerations or generalisations. It was a strength and weakness of Orwell’s polemical journalism...

And how easy it is to recognize the revenant shapes that the old unchanging enemies—racism, leader worship, superstition—assume when they reappear amongst us (often bodyguarded by their new apologists).

Much of the attraction of the cult has to do with the grace of an early and romantic death. George Orwell once observed that if Napoleon Bonaparte had been cut down by a musket ball...

I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression ‘killing time.’ It’s a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment,...

The offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the...

I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for...

Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.

You don’t say ‘they all do it’ unless you know you’ve been doing it too.

a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda” by his former idolators; to see the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarded with fear and suspicion by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (which...

The Postmodernists’ tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or who have relinquished belief only with regret. To this I reply: who wishes...

I am sorry for those who have never had the experience of seeing the victory of a national liberation movement, and I feel cold contempt for those who jeer at it.

How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?

How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?

When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair.

About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view...

Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a ‘first generation’ of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

The sad thing is that so many people, in the belief that the universe is organized to suit and influence them, are willing to sacrifice even the slight cranial capacity with which evolution has equipped...

Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn’t analyze at first and didn’t fully grasp (partly because I was far...

Mrs. Clinton, speaking to a black church audience on Martin Luther King Day last year, did describe President George W. Bush as treating the Congress of the United States like ‘a plantation,’ adding in a...

I have had my mother’s wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the National Geographic tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way...

On page 607, alluding to the end of my first marriage (and carefully remembering to state that that’s none of his business), he very sweetly says that I ‘might leave a wife, but not a...

Orwell wrote easily and well about small humane pursuits, such as bird watching, gardening and cooking, and did not despise popular pleasures like pubs and vulgar seaside resorts. In many ways, his investigations into ordinary...

How ya doin’?’ I always think, What kind of a question is that?, and I always reply, ‘A bit early to tell.

The President is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that’s what you get if...

However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I...