There’s an embarassing moment that happens to nearly all students of a foreign language, when they over-eagerly grasp to a similar sounding word to that of their own native tongue, only to find out that it’s a ‘false friend’ with a completely different meaning. Approaching Kate Rusby’s fragile and beautiful No Names, from the album […]
Caught between the devil (Britney Spears) and Gordon Sumner, the idea that an artist can reflect their politics in music has become a largely discredited notion. When putting their minds towards defeating Thatcherism artists like Billy Bragg, Paul Weller, and the Communards produced arguably some of their worst material – they may have won your […]
‘You couldn’t make it up’, screams the tabloid tv presenter as he recounts the surreal situation of Santa Claus and his helper elves being threatened by angry families in a run-down amusement park in the cultural wilderness of Kent. Far more entertaining, though starting from a similar run-down amusement park premise, is George Saunders brilliant […]
Part of the government’s master plan, enthusiastically supported by Gazeta Wyborcza (boring the country where the main serious media agrees with the government), is to put an end to early retirement in Poland. Keep cracking the whip over the backs of aging proles: that’s the ticket. Perhaps, to give the neo-liberals their due, the system […]
It’s not everyday that this monkey, or indeed the various journalists and commentators who are also writing about this case, finds it in his heart or logic to defend Rupert Murdoch or his business interests. He’s a big boy who can look after his own extensive interests – interests that are not necessarily conducive to […]
Paraphrase the famous ‘I may not like what you say, but I’ll fight to the death to defend your right to say it’ into ‘I think your sexual politics are more than a little dodgy, you look unpleasant (and decidedly unwashed), but you’re the first Irish band in history to whose music you can imagine […]
My new year’s resolution for 2009 is to not recommend any book until I’ve finished it. That gives me a couple of weeks to indulge my particular blogging vice, and there’s no better place to start than Abraham B. Yehoshua’s wonderful A Woman in Jerusalem, which I can’t recommend highly enough even though I’m only […]
This blog has already spent some time dealing with the paternalistic Italian laws that govern what you can, and can’t say. We’ll remind readers that, in a political context, one is entitled to call Silvio Berlusconi a buffoon but to suggest it in general may be another kettle of slanderous fish (although, one has to […]
I don’t know if yesterday was particularly black but look at the dates in this chart of the worst days on the FTSE 100. It’s like, how much more black could this be? The answer is none – none more black. And only a few years ago the Onion was looking into even more precious […]