Francis Wheen Quotations

She and Harold are very affecting to watch.

I find that more and more. It is not just the people you would expect to be slightly neanderthal in their attitudes - creationists, flat-earthers, as it were - but actually people who think of themselves as radicals, progressives. That is part of the problem I've found with postmodernism.

This is the bizarre thing. This exact period I'm writing about is also a period of the most extraordinary scientific and technological achievement, from the mapping of the human genome to the creation of the internet. It seems paradoxical that there should be this proliferation of mumbo jumbo at a time of such immense change and upheaval, but that may be a partial explanation for it.

It occurred to me the other day that Arthur Conan Doyle invented Sherlock Holmes, one of the great fictional embodiments of the rational deductive method - finding evidence, observation and all the rest of it. Conan Doyle himself was, however, a keen spiritualist, especially in later life, when he also fell for these ridiculous hoax photos of fairies at the bottom of the garden.