Is etymology relevant?
It did not take us long to transform civilization. In fifty years, we have almost stopped making war, standardised the possibility of making love without increasing the...
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Recent news More posts »Montaigne’s back room
In these days of solitary confinement, this correspondent remembers a one-time lawyer and courtier in 16th century France who inscribed a few lines in Latin on a pillar of his...
That Vital Need for the Pestilence-stricken Multitude
O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s . . . Thus exploded the...
Re-reading Albert Camus’s ‘The Plague’
“Everyone knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world,” writes Albert Camus in his novel The Plague (La Peste). “Yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones...
Confinement, isolation and Marcel Proust
To ……….. In these days of government recommended social isolation, we have days, may be months, to meditate on the benefits of inaction. It is nothing new though for the...
Postural reflections
Ours is a downcast generation. It appears that soon the entire humanity would curl up. By wedging the buttocks in an armchair facing a screen, the homo sapiens is shrivelled....