Words launch other words, and names have a way of establishing themselves as footholds – nothing could be truer than with the name Jesus, which – thanks to the centuries of teaching, tradition, imposition and imperialism which have used him as currency – has come to mean whatever you earnestly wish. The devil may have […]
Underwear in Poland is knotted up to all hell in connection with the upcoming 20th anniversary celebrations of the defeat of communism. Prime minister Tusk invited some other East – sorry central – European leaders to a shindig in Gdańsk, where it all began but the trade union spoilsports decided to hold a protest there […]
It’s old news now but still worth quoting: Greece passed in January 2005 a ‘media transparency law’ that would have prevented 1% owners of media companies from participating in public sector contracts. In April 2005, the European Commission told Greece that the law violated EU law and threatened to freeze funds for Greek public works […]
Pretending that the crisis is a good thing, that is. Last weekend’s “High Heels” (Gazeta Wyborcza’s ladies’ supplement) has a subhead on page 37 (above an interview with Karolina Korwin-Piotrowska, a teevee journo) that reads “This crisis has its good sides. Perhaps we will start eating bread again and I won’t have to constantly hear […]
Silvio Berlusconi has always vaunted two major talents – an ability to control the media (both his own – a substantial slice of tv and print – as well as those supposedly independent), and a masterful ability to keep together seemingly shakey partnerships. It’s against this backdrop that his second wife, Veronica Lario, dropped a […]
The Ryan Report into the abuse of children in Irish schools run by Roman Catholic religious organisations is a sobering document. Its contents are so shocking that it takes a certain act of will to believe in its findings. Reports of sexual violence of every conceivable kind co-exist with descriptions of systematic or casual brutality […]
Novelist and short-story writer Michel Faber, in his three monkeys interview, commented “I think it’s juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren’t real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.” This is […]
April is the cruellest month – always has been, and always will be, just like tuesdays never come out right; but there is hope at the end of the tunnel, glimpsed briefly through the showers. In those long northern winters, when you’re cooped up, it seems natural to think ahead, to dream – more often […]
Wailing “God Bless America…” is not the selling point on which you can convince someone of a song’s cathartic merits, even if this song magnifies in grace over one of the most astounding cinematic closing sequences ever, James Guercio’s wirey, disillusioned, Electra Glide In Blue. Tell Me, also written by Guercio, and delivered as a […]