Don’t swallow your moral code in tablet form.

Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so clear to me. If you care to imagine what any inadequate...

Life in Britain had seemed like one long antechamber to a room that had too many barriers to entry; here in the USA it seemed to be true that if you dared to give things...

I think that people’s sexual preferences are a legitimate subject for humour, dirty humour if at all possible.

It is truth, in the old saying, that is ‘the daughter of time,’ and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one...

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to...

Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have...

Religions and states and classes and tribes and nations do not have to work or argue for their adherents and subjects. They more or less inherit them. Against this unearned patrimony there have always been...

There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of work for the tempestuous Lucretia Stewart, then editor of the American Express travel magazine, Departures. Together, we evolved a harmless satire...

This brings us to the crux moment in the supposed ‘Show Trial’ melodrama. Employing the confusing and confused testimony of Jude Wanniski (who he also describes as a political nut-case, if not a nut-case flat-out,...

Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted...

A local phrase book, entitled Speak in Korean, has the following handy expressions. In the section ‘On the Way to the Hotel’: ‘Let’s Mutilate US Imperialism!’ In the section ‘Word Order’: ‘Yankees are wolves in...

Teasing is very often a sign of inner misery.

You might think that the Left could have a regime-change perspective of its own, based on solidarity with its comrades abroad. After all, Saddam’s ruling Ba’ath Party consolidated its power by first destroying the Iraqi...

I can remember when I was a bit of an ETA fan myself. It was in 1973, when a group of Basque militants assassinated Adm. Carrero Blanco. The admiral was a stone-faced secret police chief,...

Die Judenfrage,’ it used to be called, even by Jews. ‘The Jewish Question.’ I find I quite like this interrogative formulation, since the question—as Gertrude Stein once famously if terminally put it—may be more absorbing...

Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.

What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was ‘perhaps.

Faith is the surrender of the mind, it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It’s our need to believe and to surrender our...

Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn’t) ‘if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn’t quite recognize”,...

Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days...

But what [Orwell] illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that ‘views’ do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics...

The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.

The human species – mammalian primates though undoubtedly (s)he is, and made out of the dust of exploded suns – does have the need for the transcendent, the numinous, even the ecstatic. I wouldn’t trust...

The burden therefore rests with the American legal community and with the American human-rights lobbies and non-governmental organizations. They can either persist in averting their gaze from the egregious impunity enjoyed by a notorious war...

Reading his autobiography many years later, I was astonished to find that Edward since boyhood had—not unlike Isaiah Berlin—often felt himself ungainly and ill-favored and awkward in bearing. He had always seemed to me quite...

In effect, nobody who is not from the losing classes has ever been thrust into a death cell in these United States.

proofs.” This evidence and these proofs include arguments from design, revelations, punishments, and miracles. Now that religion’s monopoly has been broken, it is within the compass of any human being to see these evidences and...

Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence.

Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one’s own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave...

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we...

Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the...

What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of...

I have been taunted on various platforms recently for becoming a neo-conservative, and have been the object of some fascinating web-site and blog stuff, from the isolationist Right as well as from the peaceniks, who...

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and...

There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence. Not an attractive combination, because it results in...

[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

Madeleine Albright has said that there is ‘a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.’ What are the implications of this statement? Would it be an argument in favor of the...