Capnolagnia and liberty in Russia

I don’t think author and diplomat Juan Valera (“Good should always be in fashion”) will mind me revealing his smoking fetish, now he’s been dead 100 years. Here‘s a quick tranny of an 1850 letter from Russia: On May 8th, Russian style, I left Saint Petersburg for Moscow on the noon train, accompanied by a…

The madness of Níjar

Surprise has been expressed in circles, squares and other pleasingly simple geometrical arrangements of peapoles, that revolutionaries should want to destroy those who, according to Ken Livingstone and other prophets of the New Municipalism, are their nearest and dearest. What folly, my darlings! We creaky reactionaries know that revolutions always destroy society (and often themselves)…