It wasn’t like the World Trade Center, something vile and astonishing within our own borders, happening to people who’d saved coins of the same currency in their piggybanks when they were children. I knew intellectually...

The body protects itself, and the same happens in the mind. It occurs sluggishly and imperfectly, a bad job done by indifferent craftsmen, but within minutes an accretion of defence mechanisms starts to form around...

The food chain has victims at both ends: even rapists and murderers need someone to look down on, and kid killers will do nicely.

Just because we are capable of art didn’t what lay in front of him could be dismissed as aberration, that we could take what we admired and fence that off as human, dismissing the rest...

We’re so used to events being portrayed in particular ways that when they actually happen to us, and our life bears no resemblance to expectation, we don’t really know how we’re supposed to respond. Our...