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 […]
We kick off the new year some kilos heavier after a December spent sampling the culinary delights that make Italy such a good place to live. This may account for the scarcity of entries during the final month of 2005 – It’s hard to be quite so opinionated on an over-full stomach. A brief entry […]
“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 […]
The Christmas edition of Polish current affairs magazine Polityka contains a fairly typical look back on the year in photographs. Internationally, the year is sombre to say the least: New Orleans, the London bomb attacks, race riots in Sydney, the earthquake in Kashmir, violence in Iraq… There is no room for levity in the captions. […]
Given the Economist’s somewhat erratic policy of making material available for free online, it was a pleasant surprise to see that numerous pieces from its end-of-year double issue are easily accessible.One of the articles on America’s Most Hated Companies got me thinking. First, it made realize that, for a small country, Ireland has an abundance […]
The annual book-of-the-year lists (see here for an exhaustiveexhausting selection) is always an opportunity for those asked to nominate to showcase their taste, erudition, and, in some cases, their lack of both.However, I think the incomparable George Steiner deserves the laurels for recommending, in the December 2 issue of the TLS, the most intimidating tome […]
Some of you decadent westerners, festering as you are in your godless moral decay, may have been labouring under the misapprehension that Our Lord Jesus Christ the Almighty Saviour was born into a humble family — in a stable, in fact. Here in holy, marian Poland we know better. As cribs are erected around the […]
I have been so busy pontificating recently on political issues, that I neglected to mention, as I had hoped, that I caught the supposed “event picture” of the holidays, King Kong, over the weekend. Once I formulated the glib insight that the picture seemed to have grown fatter while its director became thinner, I was […]