Nick Lloyd enters 2007 a feedless and no doubt unrepentant Luddite, but he’s got an excellent story over at Iberianature (13/12/2006) about José Sideburns and his lynx waistcoat, re which: Francesc Candel‘s Han matado un hombre, han roto el paisaje (Antonio Rabinad recently sold me a copy at Sant Antoni) derives its dramatic strength in…
I believe the current early chronology of versions containing all the basic motifs is as follows: Joseph Fouché was a politician and administrator, and the delightfully wicked creator under Bonaparte of something vaguely resembling the modern police service. According to PBS, he wrote in something called Archives of the police of a series of murders…
Abdou Diouf, “Secretary-General of la Francophonie and former President of Senegal”, responding to Chirac in the former organisation’s first meeting outside France, in a Ceausescu palace in Bucharest: the notion of culture from a US standpoint is understood to mean entertainment rather than the expression of peoples’ souls and identities. I’ve read quite a lot…
I’ve got a soft spot for Denis MacShane, who never really fitted the New Labour mould. Here‘s a piece by him on France. The sentence that will probably annoy most: “Pour un Britannique, la France est comme un remake des années 70 au Royaume-Uni” (my emphasis).
Having a gunwoman riding pillion on the scooter seems a good idea, rather like female coxes in boat racing. One can imagine few worse distractions from one’s enduring preoccupation with road safety than having some big sweaty guy fiddling with his gun behind one’s back.
Neither the terrorists themselves nor anyone else is in disagreement about who murdered 851 fellow citizens, injured thousands more, and drove tens of thousands from their homes over the past 38 years, but the BBC has some lingering doubts: Eta is blamed for killing more than 800 people in its four-decade fight for independence for…
Lisa Spangenberg posted a while back on the recently publicised find of two 2,300-year-old bog bodies at Clonycavan and Croghan near Dublin. The BBC says of Clonycavan man that he had been using a type of Iron Age hair gel; a vegetable plant oil mixed with a resin that had probably come from south-western France…
Giving stuff away to illegals as a commercial gimmick is a terrible thing to do. When I meet illegals crossing from France, I ask them whether they’ve got cash and want to go to a bar, and if the answer’s no I push them into a ravine. It’s the capitalist way, and they’ve got to…
Nineteenth century nationalism and anti-Papism made it easy to forget the extent of Spanish influence in the Low Countries during the sixteenth century. Much of this influence was literary, with translations and localisations of Spanish classics appearing rapidly and serving as models for several generations of Dutch authors, but Iberia’s greatest gift to the Provinces–like…