It is not necessary to have suffered personally to claim the moral authority of suffering and sufferers. It is only necessary that you should belong to a group that, historically, has been wronged and suffered as a result. The glory of this, apart from the status victimhood is taken to confer, is that you can claim to have suffered enormously while leading a very privileged existence

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The criminal law is not principally therapy for criminals, as exposure therapy is for those suffering from arachnophobia. If it were, immediate repentance after committing the most terrible crimes would be as good as repentance at leisure, which clearly it is not. The case of Violette Nozière serves to illustrate that distinction

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Art needs patrons, but discriminating ones, which no doubt helps to explain why practically all public art these days manages to combine mediocrity with monstrosity. This strikes me as particularly so when alleged artists are granted access to the public purse by hapless bureaucrats taking their advice from aesthetically and intellectually corrupt apparatchiks

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The English countryside, very tame by comparison with that of Australia, provided an unpleasant surprise when my companion and I reached the summit of a substantial rise. There we found two youths drinking beer and blasting rap music. How much I would have preferred to find the missing, muslin-clad girls of 'Picnic at Hanging Rock'

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In the character of Bazarov, the original nihilist, Ivan Turgenev presents the voices of today's Western young as they insist the societies that nurtured them have been built on nothing but force, fraud, massacre, injustice, slavery and so forth. Therefore everything must be swept away

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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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