Category: Columns

  • Liquid Incense

    I must say I have never understood what the Playboy bunnies saw in Dr. Kissinger. Perhaps they’re professionally equipped to detect charm and wit where mere men miss it. Who knows, the long fluffy ears may contain hidden sensors programmed to relay subtle messages to secondary brains located in the bunnies’ gluteal powder puffs, which,…

  • The Language of Lunge

    There’s no love lost between me and the cat that lives in our house. She’s not really my cat; I bought her for one of the kids a while back. There had been a specific Christmas wish for a white kitten with a red ribbon round its neck. I had worked a lot of overtime…

  • Fresh Pink Innocence

    End-of-term gifts from one’s pupils are a recurrent pleasure of professorial life. Like the boarding-school boy who thanked the aunt for the bottle of cherries pickled in brandy, one enjoys them not only for themselves but also for the spirit in which they are given. Only once have I been given an apple (and then…

  • The Problem with Positive Thinking

    Because I am writing this column almost two months before it will show up in print, we can have ourselves a little scientific experiment. See, I just read The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, a book designed to help me tap my hidden personal powers, and I’m going to think convincing thoughts in order to test…

  • Screw It

    Don’t get me wrong. I’m as caught up in the romantic rituals of wine drinking as anyone: the instruments, shining and nearly surgical; the bottle long stored at a tilt; the small effort required to remove the cork; the serious sniff, the careful pour, the sip. But there are times I’m just not in the…

  • Echoes of the Empire

    I shall spend a lot of this summer reading Polybius. The rise and fall of empires is in the air, and Polybius is the most coherent historian of the rise of Rome—not least because he was a Greek and smart. When Polybius describes how the Roman general Titus Flaminius accomplished his mission in the Second…