There is a curious pleasure to be had in what the book trade knows as 'association copies', that is to say books once owned by someone connected to the author or to the subject of the book. The elegantly-bound slim volume in my possession by nineteenth-century French neurologist Jules Cotard is a rather good example

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Modern mothers are likely to consult their small children as to what they would like to eat: and of course most children stick to what they already know and what is most immediately gratifying. Thus their tastes are like flies trapped in amber. They will eat like children ever after, never leaving the gastronomic nursery

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Still growing, the post-COVID indebtedness of many countries is similar to that contracted during a world war and it strikes me there are few ways of dealing with it. Rapid economic growth would be best remedy, but recourse to increased taxation and inflation seem more likely. And after that? A fatalism without contentment that can easily turn to insensate rage

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In the Soviet Union, adopting proletarian ways was a survival mechanism, whereas in Oxford it was a fashion, and a pretty dishonest one -- Marie Antoinette playing the shepherdess. Alas, affectation becomes habit over time, as the relentless march of declining cultural aspiration attests

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Conservative pessimism is allied with prudence: man is not perfectible, the future is not under our rational control, make haste slowly. The pessimism of the Left is dangerously different, making a virtue of misery to justify the prescriptions social engineers and activists advance to remedy it. What it is really all about, though, is the pursuit of power

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Does bad-temperedness matter, apart from reducing the quality of daily life? I think it may end up destroying democracy and, what is far worse, freedom with it. It is tolerance, willingness to listen and good cheer that need to be explained and extolled, not loathing, denigration and hatred

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The author and essayist Ivor Brown observed that those most likely to be gulled are recipients of 'higher education that has failed to be high enough'. Those words resonate: today's pullers-down of statues are educated enough to formulate simplistic generalisations, but not to appreciate the ironies of existence

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'There was here a little grave of a child aged two who had died nearly fifty years before. On this grave was a vase with a single fresh flower in it. Two years later, when I returned to again indulge my affection for cemeteries, the vase was still there, and still with a fresh flower'

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Asked what lies ahead for the world, the most famous of contemporary French writers replied with customary asperity, 'The same—only worse.' Man does not learn from experience or from anything else, he maintains; and because time’s arrow flies in one direction only, we cannot restore a smashed civilisation. In short, we are doomed

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It is one thing to be against authority under a dispensation that will imprison you or even kill you and it is quite another under a dispensation that will do neither of these things, and may even reward you, for your supposed or alleged revolt

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