Unless definitions are narrow, rigid and clear, any attempt to limit freedom of expression because some opinions are deemed intolerable inevitably leads to the suppression of free and frank discussion. Unfortunately, our world is not made for narrow, rigid and clear definitions

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For an architect whose abstract ideas were, he assured us, very so important, he wasn’t much of a thinker. His notions were to real thought what doggerel is to genuine poetry -- a catalogue of inaccuracy, looseness, laziness and mendacity, all covered in a thick sauce of arrogant self-confidence

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Qui est Charlie? Sociologie d’une crise religieuse by Emmanuel Todd Éditions de Seuil, 2015, 252 pages, €18   On hearing of the massacre of eleven journalists at Charlie Hebdo, I thought of Karl Kraus’s magnificently laconic words: “When it comes to Hitler, I can’t think of anything to say.” Kraus, who wrote thousands of pages […]

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Ever inclined to find fault with those who did not recognise him for the genius he took himself to be, Anders Breivik's life was a catalogue of fantasies and failure. His one achievement, if that is the right word, has been to strengthen the multiculturalists. On one side angels, on the other devils

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Fame is not always proportional to merit: if it were, Simon Leys (who lived the last forty years of his life in Australia, and died last year) would have been one of the most famous writers in the world. After his recent death I asked a few Belgians of my acquaintance, all well-educated, what they […]

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