Last night my wife and I attended a piano concert by Evgeny Kissin at the Kennedy Center. Even allowing for the tendency of Washington audiences to give standing ovations to anyone who turns up, this was a quite extraordinary concert, exquisitely played. At the end there were thirty (30) curtain calls that in all lasted …
Americans have a third fewer close friends and confidants than just two decades ago — a sign that people may be living lonelier, more isolated lives than in the past. In 1985, the average American had three people in whom to confide matters that were important to them, says a study in today’s American Sociological …
Epicurus, the Athenian philosopher, included friendship among life’s necessities. "Only beasts dine alone," he is said to have exclaimed. Friends provide amusement, information, and a bracing and beautiful feeling of human connection. "Without friends," says Joseph Epstein, former editor of the American Scholar, "we are all lost." But friends can also be "an immense complication, …
He could be any American Conservative Southern God-fearing Christian…….Philip Larkin, inveighing against the “Europeanized” cultural elites of the 30s and 40s. I quote: “I HATE anyone who does anything unusual at all, whether it is make a lot of MONEY or dress in silly CLOTHES or read books of foreign WORDS or know a lot …
According to the medical journal The Lancet 650,000 people have been killed in Iraq since the war began. When this figure was queried, attacked, disbelieved, particularly by the Bush Administration and fellow-travelers, The Lancet apparently went back to the drawing board, did its sums again, and concluded that they were wrong: the original figure was …
