Author: Andrei Navrozov

First it was said that Ukraine had no cards, but then it transpired that Russia had no cards either, and increasingly it looks like I’m the only one with the cards.

As last week, I shall not dwell on the world events themselves, epochal though they are – like archival footage from A.D. 476 or 1939 – and almost beyond rational analysis.

Alexander Herzen, writing in London in the middle of the century before last, observed that the English are the world’s only nation in whose veins iron has not yet been substituted with gold.

Eccentric Brazilian philosopher Olavo de Carvalho argued that if we accept the idea that something fraudulent cannot be distinguished from the original, what really happens is that we are granting the Devil a power he does not possess.

The “How To” manual is a familiar genre, elements of which can be traced to antiquity. It shares the bookshelf in the den with Harlequin romances and other extrusions of the Edwardian epoch….

“She is an idol,” wrote Baudelaire of the woman in Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne, “who must be adorned to be adored.”

Still abed, and come nightfall thoughts swarm uncontrollably, at times to the tune of the Lord Chancellor’s song from Iolanthe……

In the days after New Year’s I was sick as a dog. The virus – Australian, I was told – overcame Palermo with a respiratory collapse unseen since the Covid debacle…