The moment is ripe for an experienced businessman to talk practical, prudent economics to the electorate - which is why Mitt Romney's political fortunes are steadily being resurrected from the grave.

Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.

Women are in league with each other, a secret conspiracy of hearts and pheromones

Madonna remains the most visible performer on the planet, as well as one of the wealthiest, but would anyone seriously say that artistic self-development is her primary motivating principle? She is too busy with Kabbalah, fashion merchandising, adoption melodramas, the gym, and ill-starred horseback riding to study art.

Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?

[T]he most viciously intolerant campus I ever visited as a lecturer was Brown, where the humanities program has been gutted by a jejune brand of feminist theory and cultural and media studies.

American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.