Yet more from Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature, this time in celebration of Catalonia’s nationalist-socialist government’s attempts to reintroduce press censorship by the back door, the stick whose complementary carrot consists of liberal sums paid to anyone who prints favourable opinions (I’m on the CIA’s payroll): A curious literary anecdote has reached us of the…
If I were a bit smarter I’d have tried a couple of alternative spellings before posting this. There’s a good chapter by Anthony Reid dealing among others with Sakender in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (ed Stuart B Schwartz) in which…
More from Disraeli’s dad, this time on the peculiarly Spanish (continental?) fondness for long titles: The Spaniards then must feel a most singular contempt for a very short name, and on this subject Fuller has recorded a pleasant fact. An opulent citizen of the name of John Cuts (what name can be more unluckily short?)…
It says here: He was left for dead along a lonely New Mexico road, and another time he broke an elbow. But little things like that didn’t stop John Triggs, 54, from completing his 13-month, 17,300-mile bicycle odyssey over the backroads of the connected 48 states, Canada and Mexico. Just had a glass of wine…
The elaborate precautions taken in Spain to mitigate the effects of such torrents as we’re having at the moment can lead to puzzlement during dry spells. Here‘s Isaac D’Israeli in Curiosities of Literature: In one of his odes [Gongora] addresses the River of Madrid by the title of the Duke of Streams and the Viscount…
Plump middle-aged woman with Marty Feldman eyes, hurrying along near the “ancient” synagogue @ 08:30: “Darling, I love you … Stop being jealous … Of course I love you … Put the chicken on at 12 … “
José Mena Aguado is apparently being punished on the basis of article 7.31 of the Ley Orgánica del Régimen Disciplinario de las Fuerzas Armadas, which requires neutrality of soldiers with respect to the various political alternatives. Since article 8.1 of the constitution requires the armed forces to defend Spain’s territorial integrity and the constitutional order,…
Everyone’s getting excited because Peruvian president-elect Evo Morales does state business wearing a chompa, which the resident linguists at El País today inform us is an indigenous word for jersey or sweater, and which is a sure sign to the paranoid right-wingers with whom I hang that he’s about to do a Chávez. No worries:…
The eighteenth century would have sounded rather different if composers had employed Persian instead of Turkish music: Xenophon and others report: “In battles, Iranians played certain sounds that made the enemy fearful and escape, such as the sound of stones falling from the mountain or the sound of a waterfall or the horrible sound of…
Moving house, so orders may take longer until mid-February - mail me first if in doubt. Shop deliveries free on foot in Leeds LS1-8 & LS13. Dismiss