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Our society really admires it when rich people give away huge piles of surplus money towards the end of their lives, particularly when they donate large sums of it to the arts. It seems so noble and so good. What nice capitalists they are. How grateful we should be to have them in our midsts!…

It sounds like a very mean and undemocratic thought, trading off the peculiar glamour that isolation has in a Romantic culture – in order to gain an oblique sense of superiority and perhaps pass off an absence of social skills as a virtue. It is important, therefore, to be clear what is meant here by…

It’s easy to get irritated by people who are very concerned about details. They are bothered by a comma, in the wrong place (that was on purpose); they get upset if the dishwasher is stacked in a suboptimal way; it takes them a month to select a colour to repaint the bedroom; they know the…

It sounds strange to ask what a novel might be for. We tend not to wonder too much what role made-up stories should have in our lives. Generally we suppose we just read them for entertainment. Yet that is to be unstrategic about a major cultural resource. A novel is a machine for simulating experience,…

It is easy to get carried away imagining a happy life. One mentally sketches the perfectly job, the ideal relationship, a wide set of fascinating yet always cheerful friends. It’s lovely to think about such things, but to get very attached to these hopes is unhelpful: life perhaps just won’t live up to them. One…

When it comes to earnings, there’s an emotionally appealing desire: ideally, we’d want to live in a world where money tracked the value of what people did. ‘Good’ salaries would mean work that was rewarded in line with how much it contributed to the lives of others. The highest pay would go to those who…