It sounds as though Bono has borrowed the Taoiseach’s scriptwriter:From RTE.ie: Bono has defended the decision by U2 to move part of the band’s business from Ireland to the Netherlands to reduce his tax bill and the tax bill of the other band members.Bono was speaking at University College Cork, where he attended a meeting […]
When King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia visited the United Kingdom last month, British Foreign Minister Kim Howells stated that Britain and Saudi Arabia could unite around their “shared values.”From the BBC news site: An appeal court in Saudi Arabia has doubled the number of lashes and added a jail sentence as punishment for a woman […]
More than a week after being wrung out by the emotional mangle of its closing pages, I still find that in the mind’s eye Cormac McCarthy’s The Road–to borrow Philip Larkin’s words–“Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.” As a host of critics, from Adam-Mars Jones to Oprah, have already discussed this dark masterpiece, I won’t […]
From today’s Irish Times: European consumer affairs commissioner Maglena Kuneva will issue an ultimatum to Europe’s biggest low-fares carrier and scores of other EU airlines tomorrow over the way they sell tickets online. She is expected to threaten to “name and shame” those airlines she believes are breaking European consumer laws and ask national regulators […]
The rise of “Globish”–English as it is spoken by non-native speakers–is the subject of a recent article in the Financial Times. What made the piece unusually illuminating is that it cogently challenges the complacency that native English speakers have about the world’s emerging lingua franca. (In other words, in the future all we’ll have to […]
I’ll never tire of this one. Here’s Gazeta Wyborcza‘s page one headline from 10-11th of November: “Hugo Chavez brata się z Kolumbijskimi terrorystami” “Hugo Chavez fraternises with Columbian Terrorists” Turning to the story within it emerges that Chavez is mediating between FARC and the Columbian government in the matter of prisoner exchange. Mediating, fraternising – […]
Further, it is obvious that since form is a principle of choice […], new forms will reveal new things in reality, new connections, and naturally, the more the internal coherence of these new forms is stressed in relation to others, the more rigorous they will be. Michel Butor, “The Novel as Research,” translated by Gerald […]
Today’s online version of the New York Times prominently featured a picture of Irish writer Anne Enright. It accompanies an article discussing how Enright’s Booker victory stoked up a bit of storm in a teacup over an article she had written in the London Review of Books about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. The centre […]
In yesterday’s entry I forgot to mention the huff that president Kaczyński disappeared into after Tusk’s victory. Apparently, before the wheels of government could be set again in motion, Tusk – like it or not, the people’s choice – had to apologise to the president for all the nasty things he said. Like for instance, […]