Olympic torches on a Parisian bus reminded me of Josep Pla, smoking merrily away on oil tankers in the famous 1976 A fondo interview with Joaquín Soler Serrano: [Full video seems to have disappeared, so these are a couple of excerpts] Not having heard other recordings, I wonder whether don José wasn’t playing up the…
T Bell, MD, Kalogynomia, or the laws of female beauty (1821): Professor Blumenbach of Göttingen, whose profound science and perfect impartiality no one can doubt, does not hesitate to say, that the English are the most beautiful people on the globe. Nor is this wonderful when we consider that ENGLAND, perhaps exclusively, presents the combination…
If you believe that Brussels is more than happy to see powerful member states neutralised by internal division–as is increasingly Spain’s case–then it becomes easier to understand the promotion by official EU “news” agency Eurolang of a French electoral lobby devoted to obtaining official status for the country’s smaller languages. Like all European initiatives of…
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…
Check the absolutely gorgeous photo by Santi Cogolludo of Albert Rivera in La Paloma, The Dove, on today’s El Mundo front page. The hall opened in the 1890s as a vice den called The White Camellia but changed its name and image in 1903, taking its interior design from Paris and its new name from…
Here‘s a lovely little thing by Jacques Prévert. Some of the best Dutch kleinkunst in the 60s was built according to French models, and brief Parisian romances with Annemaries were the order of the day. I once spent an evening listening to the splendid voice of one of Sonneveld’s writers, and I wish I could…
“It has the piercing gaze of the living and the fixed stare of the dead,” says dragonologist Jean-Marie Privat, “[and] breathes only in the shades of a strong, structured, nay, monotheistic state. It is both a representation of, and a figure of the transgression of, power, as testified by its presence in carnival. It is…
I know where I should be grazing this Christmas, thanks to the Archbishop of York: We are so lucky in this country to have churches that are nearer our homes than most supermarkets. I encourage you to take advantage of that this Christmas. Unfortunately there’s no way he can be referring to the Queen’s churches,…
‘“Bush is worse than Stalin” -Hitler’ gets 30 ghits while ‘“Bush is worse than Hitler” -Stalin’ gets 822. Is this because the people who make this kind of comparison (a) haven’t heard of Stalin; (b) think Stalin was uniquely awful, an ÃœberBusch; or (c) think Stalin was actually a nice guy with some bad press?…