Orwell biographer DJ Taylor wants to dig up the common of Southwold, a quiet Suffolk seaside resort, in order to find a time capsule that Orwell allegedly buried there 70 years ago. If found, I suspect that it will not contain a bucket and spade.
NRC Handelsblad, Holland’s most respected rag, says that the French commission that advocated banning the headscarf was strongly influenced by what it was told during a fact-finding trip to Holland in November. The two out of three members of the delegation contacted by the paper said they were shocked by the situation and in particular…
Amid celebrations of plane crashes and the imminent extermination of everyone congenitally uncongenial (uncongenital?) to a deranged fascist from Omaha, Malcolm ZZZ in his must-read 1963 Alex Haley interview for Playboy makes the following interesting assertion: When I’m traveling around the country, I use my real Muslim name, Malik Shabazz. I make my hotel reservations…
In a country in which even traffic wardens carry guns, both ERC, the party of disgraced politico Carod-Rovira, and its youth wing, JERC, like to refer to ETA as an armed organisation. Why this vagueness? A wolf and a sheep are both mammals, but it seems to me important to be able to distinguish between…
Hahahahahahaha. This is going to drive La Vanguardia’s apparently deranged plagiarist and liar Rafael Ramos completely bonkers. After months of him telling us, allegedly from London, that Blair’s lies and the BBC’s overwhelming saintliness were about to be exposed for all to see, it seems that Hutton has said the opposite. Now, I’m sure The…
Far be it from me to want to draw attention away from the Carod Rovira roadshow or to mock or criticise Esquerra in any way, but is it really true – as someone in a position to know told me last night – that Carod’s party colleague, Jordi Portabella, is heir to a decent proportion…
Just a couple of Russian daisies for the chain: One of the aims of the great Russian spelling reform of 1917 was apparently to make War and Peace shorter, thus saving paper. It is strange then that socialists in the rest of the world ended up trading c for k, which actually uses more ink.…
Tom Cruise’s devastating critique of the moral bankruptcy of societies in which hats are worn sans horns is borne out in The Daily Yomiuri‘s crime stiuris. Today’s highlights include dramatic accounts of the deeds and denouement of 71-year-old pickpocket Onna Ginji. Named after Shitateya Ginji (Ginji the Tailor), leader of a large Meiji period gang,…
So what if José Bono has called Blair a dickhead and an imbecile? Bono may be the leading candidate to lead the Spanish socialists after their almost certain defeat in the March generals, but the party is so enthusiastically engaged in auto-defenestration at the moment that it’s difficult to see them achieving anything constructive even…
The two reports this morning of sudden waves of deaths in Russia in December from cold and/or respiratory complaints and Klebsiella pneumonia both sound more like residual incidences of pneumonic plague. As far as I’m aware (visibility down to three metres this morning), kids don’t usually get Klebsiella (which resembles the plague), and both cases…