Just as there is the irony of fate, there are ironies of nomenclature. One such is writ large in the name of Alexei Navalny’s “Anti-Corruption Foundation.” As I pointed out in this space on a recent occasion, corruption in Russia is largely what stands between the Kremlin and world domination, as villains preoccupied with plundering the nation’s wealth have little time left for villainy.
“O, reason not the need,” the king tells his daughter, who has just added a cancelled security detail to the lengthening list of her father’s humiliations at the hands of his perfidious progeny. Her sister has just asked him, rhetorically, why he ever needed to have those rowdy men in the house.
The world is full of bad news, and most of it does not require a dedicated chronicler to record and analyze. So one reads, for instance, how the music department of Oxford University announces that musical notation has not “shaken off its connection to its colonial past” and is “a slap in the face to some students,” while “musical skills should no longer be compulsory” because the current focus “on white European music causes students of color great distress.”
A priest in Russia was visiting a prison last week and, as the Orthodox are now in Lent, advised the inmates “to ready yourselves for the coming of Easter, to cleanse yours souls of sin, to limit your consumption of victuals and to deny yourselves worldly diversions.”
Gentle reader, I will be frank. There are no two gentlemen of Verona in my story, and the one and only gentleman I dilate upon rather belongs to Sicily than to the north of Italy. But ever since my salad days as a jobbing journalist in London I have envied my yellow press colleagues writing headlines of the “Headless Body in Topless Bar” variety….
I must’ve been staring at the sign over the restaurant in Via Roma for too long, because my wife pulled on my coat sleeve and asked if everything was all right. This is a new Japanese restaurant in Palermo, and like all new Japanese restaurants in Palermo it was started by the Chinese
Say what you will about them, but my compatriots have brains. A new survey is just out, and though the gentle reader likely shares my own derisory view of social science, I want to use the occasion to vent some national pride. The survey, by the Moscow think tank Levada Center, sampled 1600 adults spread over 134 locations throughout Russia who were interviewed in person in their homes.
Across meridian and frontier, the world seems to be shrinking. Like a cheap shirt thrown in the washing machine by a careless teenager, or else by the slovenly and incompetent mother who raised him, it seems to have lost its original color and dimension over the spin cycle of a generation.
There is a historical episode to which time and again I turn as more news of the West’s strategic enfeeblement comes over the transom. The gentle reader may find the reference obscure, but I can assure him that to most Russians of my age and background it’s textbook stuff. The episode is the June 1937 torture and execution, on Stalin’s orders, of Marshal “Red Napoleon” Tukhachevsky. His confession of having been all along a German agent, which survives in the archives of the secret police, “is dappled with a brown spray that was later found to be blood-spattered by a...
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me” is, famously, the opening sentence of a 1941 essay by Orwell. But Blitz or no Blitz, to our ears the phrase sounds a little hysterical.
