Ferdinand Mount

Only the hardest heart would repress a twitch of sympathy. To live on the receiving end of so much gush and so much abuse, to be simultaneously spoilt rotten and hopelessly infantilised, how well would any of us stand up to it? So many functions to go to, so much dysfunction to come back to. When Princess Margaret made a guest appearance at the Borsetshire fashion show in an episode of The Archers, the producer said after the run-through: ‘That’s very good, ma’am, but do you think you could sound as if you were enjoying yourself a little more?’ ‘Well, I wouldn’t be, would I?’ the princess replied.

I believe as strongly as I believe anything that you oughtn’t to go. Have you thought enough of the horror of the solitude and the wretchedness of every single creature out there and the degrading influences of those years away from civilisation? I’ve had experience – I’ve seen my brothers and what’s happened to them, and it’s sickening to think of.

Lytton...

What makes it so tempting to regard ‘Brexosis’ as a mental disorder is its persistent streak of paranoia. Brexotics have always regarded the EU as a deep-laid plot to undermine and eventually to extinguish the nation-state in general and Britain in particular; ‘they’ are always ganging up against ‘us’. Brexotics remain deaf to the thesis that the underlying purpose of the European Union was to retrieve the nation-state after two catastrophic world wars, and to anchor it in a network of institutions that would prevent beggar-my-neighbour policies.

‘Those​ who make many species are the “splitters” and those who make few are the “lumpers”,’ Charles Darwin wrote in 1857 to his friend, the great botanist Joseph Hooker. This first recorded appearance of the handy distinction between those who bundle up the data into one big theory and those who prefer to lay out the exhibits on the table in carefully...

To weep or not to weep​: that has always been a question, repeatedly posing itself, and never answered to everyone’s satisfaction. Crying is such a two-faced thing: on the one hand, we think of it as uncontrollable, like a flinch; we burst into tears, we are racked by sobs. But we know that crying can be wilful too, a deliberate demonstration to the world of how we feel, or how we...