Collected essays from the celebrated and controversial Hitchens, ranging from responses to September 11th, through to literary criticism.
No doubt as I type this some guru is preparing a book for O’Reilly or some other press on the ‘ethics of blogging’. (For example, is it permissible to correct errors “invisibly” after posting or should you always highlight changes after the initial publish?) And of course the idiosyncratic nature of blogging is being slowly […]
Apologies to all my countless readers in the blogosphere for being remiss in offering recent posts. (I bet at least 25% of all blog postings consist of similar apologies.) It’s just that as I approached the end of my employment with “A Once-Leading Irish Software Company, Erstwhile Great White Hope of the Dotcom Bubble”, I […]
In Roberto Benigni’s film Johnny Stecchino, Benigni arrives in Sicily and is introduced to Palermo by a gangster. The mafia man talks about the great “piaghe” or curses that blight Sicily in the eyes of the world: Etna, the volcano, that, however destructive, is a part of nature and beautiful in its own way; drought, which again is a natural burden that has to be put up with; the final curse that blights Sicily, though, is a man made curse, and one which inspires fear in all those who encounter it, pitting brother against brother, family against family – (drum roll!)… the traffic!
From Seymour M. Hersh’s article in this week’s New Yorker:”The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran�s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging […]
You write a post about the lingering fascination of Nazism and what happens? The nice-but-dim third-in-line to the British throne is snapped wearing a swastika armband. Considering the Windsors are about as British as bratwurst, such antics were likely to prod the broadsheets into dredging up the Royal Family’s (and particularly King Edward VIII’s) rather […]
News from the frontlines in the war against smoke, and smokers, here in Italy is relatively subdued. Fines have been few, and the streets are crowded with smokers. It may just be coincidence, but Bologna has been obscured by fog for the last couple of days! Of course there are some exceptions to the rule. […]
News from the frontlines in the war against smoke, and smokers, here in Italy is relatively subdued. Fines have been few, and the streets are crowded with smokers. It may just be coincidence, but Bologna has been obscured by fog for the last couple of days! Of course there are some exceptions to the rule. […]
The Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch once said something along the lines of the Second World War cannot really be said to be over until parents could innocently name their child “Adolf.” That day seems to be retreating further into the future, in part due to excellent programs such as the BBC’s Auschwitz: The Nazis and […]