The problem with Catalan “philologist” and “historian” Jordi Bilbeny being a 24-carrot burro is that when he occasionally says something half sensible no one listens. The conspiracy theory which rules Bilbeny’s life is that guys like Columbus and Cervantes were really Catalan, but that a powerful group destroyed all the evidence and then disappeared without…
The last time I was in Caracas a general parked his tank outside the national assembly building and the chamber maid died of cholera. Things haven’t improved since, and Hugo Chávez’s infant daughter has just thrown a spanner in the works of the historic Bonaire invasion project by telling him to drop everything else until…
Hordes of otherwise quite sensible people here spend acres of time (makes sense to me) worrying about whether their sacred language is being polluted by others. Francisco de Sales Mayo was so generous as to extend his concern to Caló, which he claimed had suffered adulteration at the hands of the authors of early nineteenth…
The Guardian got a “panel of experts” to take a look at the Wikipedia. Here’s what Mark Kurlansky, author of The Basque History of the World, said about the Basque people entry: It says: “Aquitanians spoke a language which is proven beyond doubt to be akin to Basque.” I am not familiar with the Aquitaine…
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…
Unlike Carlos, I’m actually rather fond of Albacete, and not just because its ugliness is on a smaller scale than Birmingham’s. Although generally more energy tends to be devoted to damnation than to praise, I found out the other night, flicking through a book called Historia de la provincia de Albacete, that I’m not the…
Just as reincarnationists invariably turn out to have been princesses in earlier lives, so mad, sad Jordi Bilbeny is incapable of retrospectively assigning any but worthies to the Glorious Catalan Nation. His work on Columbus demonstrates a basic ignorance of historical sources and method–Mr Ockham let loose on Mr Bilbeny would make Sweeney Todd look…
Bit silly of Jacques to call on his “English friends to understand that they have to make a gesture of solidarity for Europe” and help out his dying economy when the man who controls the purse strings is quite clearly from north of the border. Just for the record, the phrase “amigos ingleses” appears once…
Still looking for a name for my movement dedicated to throwing off the Provençal-Catalan yoke and restoring decent, pre-Roman values, I chanced on issue 18 of Quaderns de l’Exili, published in 1946 by folks who headed over to Mexico in 1939. The big idea, expressed in the editorial, is to split the peninsula into four…
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