by Richard Farr I’m sixteen and a serious intellectual wannabe. Any lunch break, you can find me in the school corridors discoursing at length on a well-thumbed Hermann Hesse novel, or sharing with some lucky classmate the insights I’ve gleaned from half a dozen pages of Sartre. I’ve also acquired a taste for Gauloises Disque…

by Richard Farr The tree was immense even by local standards: a western red cedar that might have been a thousand years old. A botanist would want to measure it; I only wanted to touch its wrinkled face, or kneel among the roots and capture a dramatic snapshot looking up along the trunk. But it…

by Richard Farr For several weeks I’ve had an article by the excellent Rick Perlstein squatting unread in my Ought-To-Read list. The title is Everything You Wanted to Know About World War III but Were Afraid to Ask. I am afraid to ask: although I ought to want to know, right now I don’t. “The…

by Richard Farr Even if you are sympathetic to Marx — even if, at any rate, you see him not as an ogre but as an original thinker worth taking seriously — you might be forgiven for feeling that the sign at the East entrance to Highgate Cemetery reflects an excessively narrow view of the…

by Richard Farr I will use this column to defend myself against the accusation, first made by my surgical assistant Mr. Alan Turing, that I was negligent in the death of an individual under my medical care. Or, as one armchair prosecutor has said, that I am “a stereotypically British sentimentalist who thinks dogs are…

by Richard Farr In 2001, in order to become an American citizen, I had to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.”  Abjure. Prince. Potentate. That this vocabulary from the 1790s persisted…

by Richard Farr On a road trip once, navigating a deliberately eccentric route from Houston to El Paso, I was enjoying the emptiness — rocks, ravines, three other vehicles per hour — when I spotted something alien and odd. On a ridge to the northwest two monstrous hard-boiled eggs sat fresh-peeled and gleaming. It might…

by Richard Farr Historians often ask what led to Trump’s landslide victory back in 2024. All those guilty verdicts in the “PornHush” trial certainly helped — the final proof, for many, that the President was an innocent lamb set upon by crooks. And the November exit polls showed that millions of patriotic Americans found democracy…

by Richard Farr Beautiful, enchanting Andalucía! — but I probably shouldn’t say that. It’s one of my favorite places in the world and we got to spend the whole of March traveling there. We even spent a week in a town with fabulous food, glorious beaches and lashings of history that the international tourist trade…

by Richard Farr I’m writing this 37,000 feet above Vestmannaeyjar, a chain of islands off Iceland’s south coast. Or so the screen tells me – I can’t see the view because I’m wedged into 38E, a middle seat at the back near the loos. The ambient noise and vibration are roughly what you’d experience with your…

by Richard Farr You might think London’s National Portrait Gallery is a temple of celebrity, and it’s true that many of the faces on these walls belong to mere royalty, or influential past Nabobs, or those more recently glossy with fame. But the people who draw me back again and again are the ones who…

by Richard Farr At first, the countless violations of the law by our new rulers still caused a degree of disquiet. But among the incomprehensible features of those months, my father later recalled, was the fact that soon life went on as if such crimes were the most natural thing in the world. —Joachim Fest,…

by Richard Farr This is the final part of My Drug Problem, a no doubt annoyingly elliptical three-part essay on psychedelics. Part One, A Mere Analogy, is here; Part Two, The Woman in the Cave, is  here. Interest in psychedelics has gone so mainstream that it’s embarrassing not to be able to do the usual thing,…

by Richard Farr This is the second part of a three-part essay, My Drug Problem. Part one, A mere analogy, is here. Your life is not going according to plan and you’ve started to wonder what the gods are playing at. Still, the decision to consult the Oracle at Delphi is not one you took…

by Richard Farr Part one: A mere analogy You’ve always dreamed of foreign travel and you’re aware that there’s a long history of people doing it, and benefiting from it. But you live under a regime that closed the borders a couple of generations ago, at the same time criminalizing the act of researching potential…

by Richard Farr We called my English teacher Scab for no particular reason except that it took the edge off our terror. A big man in a double breasted jacket, he wore tinted glasses that hid his expression. His head looked as if it had been carved rather carelessly from a boiled ham. “You are…

by Richard Farr From our Men’s Modern Living correspondent: I know, I know. You’re thinking: “Don’t even start. I saw two dozen spittle-flecked jeremiads on this topic last week alone, including that 17,000-word essay by Randomdude in one of those illustrated monthly magazines they have at my club. Substack? It was called something like Apocalypse…

by Richard Farr Early in life, when a child’s tender ear is supposed to be protected from blasphemy, I must have overheard someone say it’s only a game.  I went to the kind of English boarding school at which rugby, patriotism and Christianity were serious business, competed with each other for our attention, and sometimes…

by Richard Farr Lucky you, reading this on a screen, in a warm and well-lit room, somewhere in the unparalleled comfort of the twenty-first century. But imagine instead that it’s 800 C.E., and you’re a monk at one of the great pre-modern monasteries — Clonard Abbey in Ireland, perhaps. There’s a silver lining: unlike most…