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 or cr...
British diplomats and Anglo-American types in Washington have a near-superstitious prohibition on uttering the words 'Special Relationship' to describe relations between Britain and America, lest the...
Orwell's short and intense life has for years borne witness to some of those verities of which we were already aware. Parties and churches and states cannot be honest, but individuals can. Real books...
I respect those who say that the United States should simply withdraw from the Middle East, but I don't respect them for anything but their honesty.
Any critique of realism must begin with a sober assessment of the horrors of peace.
To take a side against Rushdie, or to be neutral and evasive about him in the name of some vaguely sensitive ecumenical conscience, is to stand against those who try to incubate a Reformation in the M...
The ability to master other languages (which would have hugely enhanced the scope of these answers). Fully conscious, and either fighting or reciting (or fooling around). The way in which it makes for...
People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age...
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...
Thus , dear reader, if you have come this far and found your own faith undermined—as I hope—I am willing to say that to some extent I know what you are going through. There are days when I miss my own...
He was so much the picture of different kinds of assimilation that it was almost a case of multiple personalities.
[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as anticlimax began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words The Personal is The Politic...
To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's...
Kim Jong Il, incidentally, has been made head of the party and of the army, but the office of the presidency is still 'eternally' held by his adored and departed dad, who died on July 8, 1994, at 82....
Among the privileges of being a superpower, the right and the ability to make a local quarrel into a global one ranks very high.
I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.
Trotsky was so much an intellectual that in the final analysis, Marxism was not quite enough for him.
Remember that it is 'free-thinking Jews,' not Jews as such, who are defined as the undesirables by T.S. Eliot in .
Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you prov...