Nicosia, Cyprus, 1964 I was not allowed to ask him any more than thirteen questions and these had to be submitted to his PR man for the President’s approval upon our arrival in Nicosia, before I had any real chance to assess the situation. I submitted fairly basic questions hoping to expand on them during […]
He was a typical Pole, who said “no” to everything Slawomir Mrozek describes his father in the autobiographical Baltazar.
So divided is the new government that each ministry becomes the fief of the party that holds it. The ministries are, in practice, patronage machines employing only party loyalists. They are milked for money, jobs and contracts. Ministers cannot be dismissed for incompetence or corruption, however gross, because it would lead to the deal between […]
This weekend’s skittishly unpredictable Gazeta Wyborcza has an intriguing article on the always fascinating subject of the European Union by Judit Kiss, a Hungarian economist. The article is built around a tortuous analogy between the EU referendum and the Merchant of Venice as yet another technocrat tries to perusade us that they read literature too. […]
In the previous post I mentioned how a line in a Langston Hughes poem was changed in communist Poland from “And the slime in hotel spittoons: / Part of my life” to “The slime in hotel spittoons / That’s my life.” As it happens, “That’s my life,” is a phrase that might reverberate with some […]
Todays’s Rzeczpospolita has a translation of part of yesterday’s Guardian editorial. Interestingly, Rzeczpospolita leaves out a few sentences from the Guardian piece without following the convention of putting in ellipsis to mark the ommission. Also, the Polish newspaper translates the original “the old left” with the words “extreme left-wingers.” The Guardian suggests that Chavez is […]
Quote from a Polish politician who shall remain nameless: The overwhelming majority of mafia members in Poland and abroad are heterosexual. This was in response to the real nut-job of the piece, Wojciech Wierzejski, a member of the current, democratically elected Polish government, who has demanded in parliament that links between homosexual organisations and the […]
One aged man, grey and anonymous, stands watching pomp and ceremony as he is conferred with the title of head of State. Change the soundtrack and uniforms and it could be either the Kremlin or the Vatican. Instead it’s the Quirinale, the Italian Presidential palace, and the greyish figure is Italy’s newly inaugurated 11th President. […]
Sometimes you have to admire Poles their openness. The new head of the state TV channel is the right wing Bronisław Wildstein. In the puling adolescent west the new boss of a TV station or newspaper might be expected to trot out some feelgood cliches about how he does not intend to interfere in anyway […]