Saintsbury
Through A Glass Lightly
A vintage volume of wine essays is worth savouring
David Garrick, Wine Merchant
The actor’s brief career as a wine dealer was a dismal failure, but something of this former way of life stayed with him
Befuddled Ambition
How drunken disorientation propels Bel Ami‘s protagonist to self-advancement
Sipping At The Symposium
Literary symposia from classical Athens to Muriel Spark
Drink In A Cold Climate
The law has changed its view of drunkenness greatly over time and from nation to nation
Ape And Grape
The drinking habits — and political inclinations — of the orang-utan
Veni, Vidi, Vinum
The Romans had a tendency towards alarming additives in their drinks
Grape Vs. Weed
Why Baudelaire preferred the healing effects of wine to the despondency of hashish
A Few Glasses Of Sheridan
The playwright Sheridan had a prodigious fondness for drink, even by the standards of his hard-drinking age
Sacramental Liquid
Drink, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s works, both reveals and debases
Tolerating the intolerant
“For those who thought that a global pandemic would sound the death knell for identity politics, think again”
How to prevent the next pandemic
‘I have been reporting as a science journalist for years that the world is at increasing risk of pandemics like this; that this was predicted; that we know what we need to do to prepare and we simply haven’t done it; and that more and worse pandemics are coming so we need to do that, now’
D’où parles-tu? The post-truth world
Power, illusion and the open society: how postmodernism undermines our foundational concepts