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became an English professor, and by the late 1970s was teaching at a small liberal arts college. One year my colleagues and I became unhappy with our salary and conditions, and I found myself on a committee organized to address the problems. The committee’s first task was to draft a statement defin…

MMy father used to express his hopes for me while passing through the doorway between his small store in front and our apartment in the rear. He’d talk to my mother as though I wasn’t standing right there. ‘He’s artistic,’ he’d say. ‘He could become a sign-painter. People always need signs. Pays go…

Our group of Americans looked up to this man, but I don’t know how he felt about us. He told us, perhaps only partly in jest, that they talk about two kinds of Aids in Uganda: slim Aids and fat Aids. People with slim Aids get thinner and thinner and thinner until they finally waste away. Fat Aids a…

I once asked my boss if we shouldn’t be out helping the poor and the sick, rather than searching for the meaning of a dot inside a bug that was almost too small to see.

‘The poor and the sick will always be with us,’ he said, ‘but we will change the way people think about the world.’

He had a…

In this, I was fortunate. The disesteem of money, symbolized by inflation, existed alongside a new and exaggerated esteem for money. In Britain, Germany, the states of central Europe, Russia, Latin America–indeed, everywhere I went, but particularly in Britain–money was quickly displacing all other…