Year: 2016

Simon Heffer on Richard Evans Pursuit of Power: oh dear

Simon Heffer on Richard J. Evans, The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 (Penguin History of Europe), to paraphrase him, falls well below [the Speccie’s] normal standards of copy-editing: And there are factual errors which in their range also help illustrate the scope of the book: there was no such person as Lord George Macartney; Gorz…

Viktor Orbán 0, Shakespeare 1

Mr Fido, who compensates for a distinct lack of charm with cunning a-plenty, has a piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine. Called “Are you against peace?”, the customary response to awkward questions of Communist officialdom during the Soviet era and of EU officialdom now, he says that we should be worrying rather less about the future…

Funding the hole in Spain’s pension pot left by Rajoy’s economic miracle

Maybe it’s me, but my impression is that the quality of official EU translation has deteriorated quite sharply in the past few years. But I think we all know, in article 60 of the IORPs Directive, which the Commission is trying to smuggle past national parliaments without discussion or publicity on this busy summer weekend,…

Benidorm: moderately poor translation as a selling point redux

I remember being rather disappointed when, aged 6, one of my first friends in England, the son of refugees from the new Islamism in South Asia, now the old Islamism in Tower Hamlets and Luton and Blackburn, explained to me that there were indeed streets and libraries in Pakistan. I have no idea what happened…