Blogger Ellis Sharp delivers a pretty devastating critique of John Banville’s radio play, Todtnauberg, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 last week as part of the Holocaust commemorations. I was listening to it on the laptop while engaged in the distinctly low-tech and unelevating task of doing the washing-up. But with dialogue along the lines of […]
Today’s RTE (Radio Telef�s Eireann. RTE is the state broadcaster in Ireland) news website contains a report on the Jean Charles De Menezes killing. The report contains the following sentence: “Mr de Menezes was shot dead by police at a London underground station six months ago when he was mistaken for a suicide bomber.” How […]
The reliably dyspeptic Joseph Epstein recently penned an article with the upbeat rubric, Are Newspapers Doomed? Although eulogies for printed news dailies have been appearing fairly regularly since the advent of radio, Epstein�s article is interesting in the way it remorselessly analyses newspapers’ flailing attempt to attract young readers with a bourgeoning range of �lifestyle� […]
I complimented Beatroot for predicting a rapprochement between PO (Civic Platform) and PiS (Law and “Justice”) the other day. But now the nearly-ruling PiS looks like it’s getting into bed with Lepper’s Samoobrona (see previous post). Political commentators in Poland seem to be in the enviable position that any prediction they make – any at […]
My fellow monkey, Shane Barry, is exercised by Irish politician Mary O’Rourke’s “working like blacks” comment. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear: Come to Poland! Listen to these pearls of wisdom from Andrzej Lepper, leader of the Samoobrona party, and a man not long ago considered a political pariah but now moving closer and closer […]
Here’s a lazy one, lifted from Nie (“No”) magazine. In Warsaw central railway station they have opened a special “Service Point” for intercity train travellers (or “the rich”) where you can, as Nie says, have a coffee and send flowers to your wife or fancy woman but not buy an intercity train ticket – for […]
In my last post I promised I would detail some of the more evident flaws in Tony Judt�s otherwise impressive achievement, Postwar. First, and perhaps it is just chauvinistic chippiness, but I wondered whether Albania having more index entries than Ireland is significant in what it reveals about the mindset of English-born academics of a […]
No one in their right mind would be interested in the squalid personnel-changes that pass for politics in Poland but the elevation of Zyta Gilowska to minister of finance and deputy prime minister illustrates a few realities about where power lies in Poland that might go some way to reassure those who are worried about […]
“They queue at the check-in desks in near silence, the weather-beaten, mountainy men in their cleanest dirty clothes with the tell-tale spatters of plaster; the sprinkling of women of a certain age, with the sprayed-rigid hair-dos in unlikely colours…” So begins a model of sloppy reporting and editing entitled “A Polish homecoming” in the Irish […]
Over the Christmas break I succeeded in getting through Tony Judt�s monumental (878 pages) Postwar, which, incidentally, was chosen by the editors of the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year that�s just ended. The sheer scope of the book�tackling the history of Europe from 1945 right up to […]
