Thanks to the eager eyes of one of my loyal readers, I have updated my previous posting. As many people will know, the Irish Minister for Justice is not, as I wrote earlier, Malcolm McDowell but, of course, Michael McDowell. Perhaps the unconscious change of forename is linked to memories of A Clockwork Orange, which […]
I caught Harold Pinter’s Nobel lecture on television today. All in all, a perplexing performance. It began promisingly with Pinter describing the origins, in a phrase and an image, of two of his great plays, The Homecoming and Old Times. Then, with a few perfunctory comments about the nature of lies in modern politics, he […]
I caught Oliver Hirschbiegel�s chilling film, Downfall last night on Channel 4�s latest offshoot, More4. If it weren�t for the fact that the picture was actually released in 2004, it would definitely be a contender for my picture of the year. What was disturbing about the movie was not so much the scenes of Berliners […]
World AIDS day, the 1st of December, in Italy garnered much the same news time as the preparations for International Mountain Day (“an opportunity to create awareness about the importance of mountains to life”). News reports on the State broadcaster RAI focussed on the growth in HIV infection worldwide, in the main in third world […]
It is fitting to start this account with this image, as in many ways, it shows the start of the Christmas story. It was painted by Fra Angelico (c.1390-1455) a Dominican friar, probably for the Dominican house of San Domenico in Fiesole, near Florence. It was bought in 1612 for the Duke of Lerma’s chapel […]
November 30th marked a worldwide protest against the death penalty. The date was chosen to commemorate the first State to officially abolish the death penalty – the Duchy of Tuscany in 1786. There’s little to add to this, apart from the fact that the number of States where the death penalty has been abolished is […]
Album #6 from Oasis, not counting live albums and b-side compilations.
Debut album from Scunthorpe singer-songwriter Stephen Fretwell. It’s a smile free zone, but with classic tunes.
With apologies to the Harper�s Index, here are some factoids that caught my eye during recent reading, online & offline, presented in the form of figures:8: Average age, in years, of cars in Germany (Source: �In Germany, a Puzzling Prescription for Economic Health,� New York Times )40,000,000,: Approximate population of France during the Second World […]