Falling for makebelieve
Men and women, we were told in school, have been engineered by God to be attracted to each other and thus ensure the continuance of the human race. But perhaps there is a design fault.
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Gathering Dust
What are all those old books for anyway? Could you not get them out of the library? Do you ever read them? I never see you reading them.
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Bellow’s Gift
Saul Bellow judged that many people he knew had made too much of an investment in the difficult texts of Marxism to ever accept that it no longer had very much to say about reality. Can we say that about any later intellectual fashions?
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Google that, mister!
Rebecca Solnit is far from impressed by the corporate behemoth that owns everyone’s favourite search engine – and all its works, and all its pomps.
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Miss Austen’s Merits Debated
Miss Fox, of Fleet Street near Charing Cross, though of uncertain family, unknown fortune and indifferent parts, was a young woman of very definite opinions, many of them other people’s.
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Business Strategy
Some clients of Amazon are a little aggrieved at the company’s business practices. The company says it only wants to sell all its books for nothing, make everyone happy and set all the horses free.
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Modern Turkish: A Catastrophic Success
Modernising influences in Turkey tried to impose a purely Turkic language with a new alphabet in place of the rich mixture of Turkic, Arabic and Persian which had comprised the language of the Ottoman empire. This led to a few problems.
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The Black International
What kind of conspiracy is the European Union anyway? A Papist one, or a German one?
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Come in! The kettle’s on the boil!
Some of our new fellow Europeans don’t like the government knowing their business. Sure, they’re only human.
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Kneeling in the Ghetto
Former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, now 94, insists that the proper attitude for his countrymen and women to adopt to Poland involves a continuing humility and patience.