Check out this substantial bombshell being chucked at the Spanish establishment at all levels and in all territories for its collective refusal to confront (indeed for its participation in) the flagrant, widespread, long-term abuse of individual property rights. But will the threat of a Bulgarian-style loss of European funds to the common weal be sufficient…
Apparently we anglocabrones used to think that crossing oneself was prerequisite to being Spanish. Here’s Juan Goytisolo in La Guardia, a short story written in the early 1950s, partly available in GBS: From the window I saw a group of conscripts in parade dress. It was Sunday and the officers’ room was deserted. Its furniture…
The definite article is used to indicate that the object of one’s disapproval is a superlatively scaggy prostitute. In this case we’re talking Barcelona council, which has taken to impounding cars in dubious circumstances to make up its revenue shortfall: Local Marxist-Papists are not introduced to criticisms of their shameful heresy at school, but closer…
This is the horrendously debt-ridden nationalist-whatever Catalan regional broadcaster, the “whatever” bit depending on the composition of the regional government. In five years it has halved its audience share, dropping from first to fourth place. “De hecho, toda la información es finalista, en el sentido de tener como objetivo prioritario la visión de extrema izquierda…
Étienne Cabet‘s Voyage en Icarie (excerpt) is his novelised idealisation of Napoleonic nationalist totalitarianism: if not exactly a New Jerusalem, then certainly a New Paris, built around a New Seine, designed by its dictator, the Icar. This book and its hype led hundreds of families, mainly French, principally artesans (sez James Chastain) to doom and…
Mr Clarke blogging at It’s Probably The Pox, My Son links to a typical bit of mendacity, or gross ignorance if you are feeling charitable, from John Hooper at the Guardian: Silvio Berlusconi, who won a general election earlier this month, welcomed the latest evidence of Italy’s leap to the right by declaring: “We are…
Latin American, actually, but you could have fooled me. Apparently (via), according to Mendoza/Montaner/Llosa: The perfect idiot’s political tutelage included, in addition to connivings and resentments, a mixture of the most varied and confusing ingredients. First, of course, there is a lot of the Marxist vulgate from his university years. In those years, various introductory-level…
I omitted one feasible fraudulent etymology from the Viadós post because the etymon in question is little known and less read, even in his own country, whichever that was. Here he is anyway, in another anecdote from Cela‘s late but frequently excellent A bote pronto: Some 65 years ago, more or less, possibly more, when…
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