Sublime

To the passport office to collect my new passport, valid for another ten years. In 1965 I’ll be fifty-nine and the thought makes me feel faint. What’s happened to my life? These ten-year chunks that are doled out to you in passports are a cruel form of memento mori. How many more new passports will I have? One (1965)? Two (1975)? Such a long way of

what the philosopher can contribute to politics is not at all the will to power, but disinterestedness.

stoicism,

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. The main thing is freedom.” Bill Gove

For Lee Kuan Yew,26 the aspirational ideal was to become, as Confucius urged more than two thousand years ago, a junzi, which has been variously translated as an “exemplary person,” or “gentleman.” This was someone who is27 “loyal to his father and mother,” “faithful to his wife,” “brings up his children well,” and is a “loyal citizen of his empero

it was rapidly becoming clear that he was too old, mystical and otherworldly even to begin to fit the role of a leader in war. He was after all eighty-two years old, and lacked any of the energy, ambition and worldliness, and indeed the drive and determination, needed to ride the tiger of rebellion.

Lord Canning had at first been quite open to the Chronicle’s suggestions, but was eventually, and reluctantly, persuaded not to order the levelling of the city. The man who persuaded him was John Lawrence.

Business fucking Studies. It wasn’t entirely true to say that his father had chosen it for him, but it was true that his father had been a lot more supportive of this than he would have been of, say, drama. Hassan would have liked to study drama. But he’d have had to fund it himself, so where had the harm been in going with the flow? That way, he’d

For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The