Right-wing American commentator Edward Luttwak (author of Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook, and controversial articles like ‘Give war a chance’ and the heavily criticised ‘President Apostate‘) gave a novel and clear-cut explanation of the credit crunch and its likely effects on the Italian public during a discussion last week on RAI3’s Ballarò. Novel because, unlike most […]
How many albums have Oasis released since What’s the Story Morning Glory? The correct answer here is ‘ who cares? they’ve all been shit’. Alan McGee, founder of creation records and the man who pushed Oasis into the spotlight in the first place is convinced that their latest album is (finally) worth listening to – […]
Imagine the scene: The revolutionary court stands to order as its three women judges enter. There’s a tension in the air, the atmosphere is electric, as the accused stands in all his fuzzy-faced glory. There was a time in the mid-eighties when all you could hear on the radio had his reverbed vocals, and now […]
The idea of chess being used as a central and unending metaphor in a narrative is not an original one. The links are obvious and the structure is clear. Life is about strategy and staying several moves ahead of the opposition is crucial. Pawns are expendable and with careful play, the good guy, or at […]
Many English-speaking readers will know that Carlos Ruiz Zafón burst onto the international literary scene with The Shadow of the Wind. The English translation first appeared in 2004 and soon hit the best-seller lists. But the Sombra del viento phenomenon had already been gathering momentum for two or three years in Spain. In fact, Zafón […]
Here’s an oddity from last Friday’s business supplement to the Irish Times. Despite the – so hard to avoid a cliche here – tumult? turmoil? meltdown? crash? in banking and on the markets the paper found space for a short article on the “Growing importance of protecting company data.” Space was, however, lacking for the […]
“It may come to us as something of a shock to realise that many of the texts that we treat as English originals are in fact translations, some from other languages, some from older forms of English, some from both. The Bible, The Iliad, Beowulf, the works of Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hugo, Goethe, […]
There’s an interesting campaign, launched by the European Women’s Lobby, called ‘50/50 No Modern European Democracy Without Gender Equality‘. The idea is to pressure political parties to put forward electoral lists that with a balanced number of male and female candidates for the next European Parliament elections in 2009, and to persuade Governments to correct […]
Aleksandra Lojek-Magdziarz writes for the Guardian on Polish matters. She is certainly on top of her brief. Check this out from August 1st: “Are Poles in Britain really starting to go home? Right now, I have no plans to do so, but you never know.” Note the effortless shift from “Poles” to “me.” She continues […]