Towards the end of part 2 of Quixote, Sancho Panza is hailed by a German pilgrim who turns out to be Ricote, a Morisco from Sancho’s village. Ricote was driven out of Spain by religious persecution and has spent his exile in France, Italy, and Germany, near Augsburg, where I found we might live with…
There’s a curious note in the part of Alfonso X’s General estoria (ca 1280s) where he’s listing the languages spoken by Japheth’s descendants, sensibly identified early on as Europeans by European bible scholars:
I had a re-run of the old Iraq drunken brawl the other night with a left-wing journalist, who said basically that democracy would never work there and (after a couple more beers) did not work anywhere else, particularly not in Britain, because it’s just not the kind of thing humans are good at. This peculiarly…
The Italians sem to take a more practical attitude to the trombone than do the Spanish: “Rossini’s father played trombone in a company of travelling comedians, in which his mother sang. At 10 Rossini deputised for his father; later he sang in the choruses until he lost his voice; and at 21 he was the…
2005 is pork barrel year for defence minister José Bono’s home region of Castilla-La Mancha. This should help mend relations between the local socialists and Madrid, which had become strained over water redistribution policy.
Things have come to a pretty pass when lovely girls, handsome men, gorgeous costumes, melodious songs and a splendid orchestra no longer constitute suitable educational material for American students. It is easier to understand why attempts to bring Gilbert and Sullivan to Catalonia have failed. Here’s part of a review by J Donald Smith of…
