An awareness of one’s own mortality is not necessarily accompanied by a corresponding sense of maturity. John Kinsella is, to all outward appearances, a mature man, but he is precise about how old he feels:’10.’ I laugh. ‘Seriously, I really don’t feel as though my mentality had changed at all in the last 50 odd …
El Gobierno, trasponiendo una directiva comunitaria, ha regulado el sueldo de los banqueros tratando de evitar incentivos perversos que animen a los directivos a asumir riesgos que pongan en peligro las entidades. Tardía reforma de un aspecto -los emolumentos de los más altos ejecutivos- que ha causado alarma social a los perdedores de la crisis …
Whenever we present our arguments to other people we usually make out that our logic is such that everyone must agree with us. (‘Be reasonable. See it my way.’) After all, our private logic is always logical to us. This is why no politician is ever a liar. In your logic and my logic he …
The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, All things to us; but in the course of time, Through seeking we may learn, and know things better. But as for certain truth, no man has known it, Nor will he know it; neither of the gods, Nor yet of the things of which I speak. …
‘You’re moving away from the real world.’ ‘What real world? There is no real world, is there?’ She said patiently, ‘Yes, the world of ordinary people and the shit they have to deal with-unemployment, bad housing, boredom. Soon you won’t understand anything about the essential stuff.’ Hanif Kureishi, “The Buddha of Suburbia”.
A mature society is one that reserves its moral outrage for what really matters: poverty and preventable disease in the third world, arms sales, oppression, injustice. Bad language and sex might offend some, who certainly have a right to complain; but they do not have the right to censor. They do not have to watch …
Yo también nací en 1917. Yo también estoy indignado. También viví una guerra. También soporte una dictadura. Al igual que a Stéphane Hessel, me escandaliza e indigna la situación de Palestina y la bárbara invasión de Irak. Podría aportar más detalles, pero la edad y la época bastan para mostrar que nuestras vivencias han sucedido …
People seem to have a psychological need for images that convey gripping, scary, upsetting ideas. It does not really matter what images succeed in stimulating us to feel these emotions, as the great variety of horror films shows. Our cultural heritage has conditionated us to think that the crucifixion is especially emblematic, because the corpse’s …
Freshening cloths and other feminine hygiene products have little interest for Sissel Tolaas, but she admits that living in a un-deodorised body is unsettling. “What is the body without the smell of mango? You don’t know,” she says. “And before mango, it was lemon, and before that, rose. People are so used to fictions, that …
Canadian nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton had an odd bill presented to him on his twenty-first birthday. It was a record kept by his father of all the expenses connected with young Ernest’s childhood and youth, including the fee charged by the doctor for delivering him. Even more oddly, Ernest is said to have paid …