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…
Far from welcoming Napoleon as a liberator from the evil Bourbons, Catalan irregulars inflicted some of the most significant and discouraging defeats suffered by the French in Spain. However, things were not always as they seemed. Here’s a bit of Antoni Moliner Prader’s dossier, Popular resistance in Catalonia: somatenes and migueletes in the French war:…
This is the promised translation of the chapter in Pío Baroja’s serialised novel The adventures, inventions and mystifications of Silvester Paradox / Aventuras, inventos y mixtificaciones de Silvestre Paradox (1901) in which Silvester takes up with an English conman, quack, amateur pugilist and exponent of inventions such as the translatoscope called Macbeth. The source is…
Boadella of Ciutadans has a sound bite: “Just as there are the ill who believe themselves Napoleon, so there are collectives who believe themselves a nation.”
More inspiring palindromes in OV Michaelsen’s Word Play Almanac. (Re Napoleon: there used to be, and may still be, a band called Remarkable Elba Kramer.)
PP senator Carlos Benet has said that Pavía entered Congress on a horse (during the 1874 coup), Tejero with a pistol (this is the 1981 coup that failed), while Zapatero arrived by suburban train (the reference is to the Al Qaeda train bombs before the elections two years ago). I don’t think Pavía actually went…
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…
Even if you stay clear of the Russian gun smugglers in the port, it’s still often very difficult to follow Antwerp dialect, with its Anglicisms (makkadam, “asphalt”), Gallicisms (memmaure, “memory”), games (‘t Chingchangsplein for Sint Jansplein, “St John’s Square”) and surreal inventions (I get halfway through melkkaarenoungdenaar, “lousy haircut”, and then lose track of what…
I think I can show that the term guiri is traceable to Semitic roots, and I will do at some stage, but I’d just like to add a little bit of very vaguely circumstantial evidence to an alternative hypothesis discussed here. At the time I turned over in bed and muttered: So was the term…
Spain has often been a (reluctant) Francophile, so it should surprise none but heartless materialists that–with an assist from Google Print’s OCR–“Napoleon had beer in secret correspondence with Charles [IV]’s son.” I knew that German technology took over from French after its successful demonstration in 1871, and I’d heard all about the post-WWII triumph of…
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