I don’t know if Arabella inspired the younger generation the way her grandfather did the older, but the first modern mention I’ve seen is the following, from El País of 10/11/1976: Arabella Churchill, granddaughter of Winston Churchill, has joined the London squatters and occupied the second floor of an abandoned house to open a restaurant,…
Re a post by Amando de Miguel in his interesting, if fairly Pleistocene, language column for Libertad Digital, I’ve compiled a little table of hits over time from Mark Davies’ corpus for several Spanish versions of the Great Satan (no hits in there for el Gran Satanás unfortunately). I’ve omitted USA = América because I’m…
Via après moi, le déluge, the online collection of the Portuguese National Library, with yet another interface to learn. (Why don’t they just give their money and projects to Google?) I didn’t know that Portugal fought in the Great War, but here’s the German Master Race Spider, a Portuguese soldier, and a poster from 1923…
Were Zapatero to read the Bible as thoroughly as we Carpathian Independents, he’d be in a better position to understand the significance of the first photo-album of his glorious Alliance of Civilisations: the crowds sent to die in a desert in connivance with Morocco, the stigmata on the hands of those who make it over…
The other day I was walking across a field with a very old and pretty conservative farmer when he suddenly started singing The Internationale, which he was made to learn during Communist rule (1936-9). Not to be outdone, I sang a verse of the fascist anthem, Cara al sol, which I learnt in order to…
Thanks for the concerned mails. The cooperative gave us the day off, so I’m able to report that, far from being drunk or dead, I am in fact drownded, and that neither in the Jesus Sea, nor in the Odys-sea, but in the rippling Manchegan earthsea, where gypsies wear latex and smell of Eau de…
In Amor se escribe sin hache (Amor is written without H, 1929), “an almost cosmopolitan novel,” Enrique Jardiel Poncela describe Birmingham as “the Albacete of the United Kingdom.” Not to be outdone, José Martínez Azorín (who also gave the Generation of 98 its name) baptised Albacete “the New York of La Mancha.” That all this…
Margaret Marks says that the Marxist-Leninists are not giving away balloons in the German elections. I hope this is because they can’t afford them rather than for ideological reasons. While it is true that Jimmy Connolly saw in them the nemesis of the working classes, a progressive balloon vendor appears in one of my favourite…
Glad to see the French are bemoaning the death of Cockney. There’s a lovely bit in George Borrow’s Romany Rye where he has moved into an inn in which there was a barber and hair-dresser, who had been at Paris, and talked French with a cockney accent; the French sounding all the better, as no…
Xavier (check his crazy blog, Le dicon) in an interesting comment has introduced me to Jean-Pierre Brisset. Brisset is interesting because he anticipates Derrida (différance) by taking a a lexical trick that works only in French and using it as the basis for universal theory, despite most of us not having been blessed with an…