Author: Andrei Navrozov

It may be that the name of Astrid Lindgren is utterly unfamiliar to the gentle reader.  In this possibility, perhaps more than in anything else, he differs from the inhabitant of Russia, whether in its Soviet or in its present totalitarian incarnation.  For every Russian of whatever age now living has read and can quote from Karlsson-on-the-Roof– a cross between Le Petit Prince and Mary Poppins–with the consequence that Lindgren is more famous in Russia than Marx, Lenin, or for that matter St. John the Evangelist. Born in 1907 in Sweden, Lindgren was a writer of children’s books.  Globally, I...

The burkini, in case the gentle reader doubts that I know how to use Wikipedia, is a “modesty swimsuit for women,” covering the whole body like a diving suit, with only the wearer’s face, hands, and feet exposed to the omniscient eye of Allah – one of whose Quranic epithets, incidentally, is “Al-Musawwir,” meaning shaper or designer.  The burkini was trademarked in 2007 by a Muslim lady called Aheda Zanetti, but I note that a garment of exactly the same description made a public appearance over fifty years ago – in the television series The Avengers, worn by Diana Rigg...

Thirteen million Britons have voted for Jeremy Corbyn, a delusional pacifist and nostalgic socialist.  The news that Kensington, for the first time in London’s history, is now a Labour borough is counterintuitive, rather like learning that the president of the United States is black, a member of Skull and Bones, cannot distinguish between Iran and Iraq, thinks Latin is the language of Latin America, uses Twitter, and cannot spell the word “counsel.”  If leaders of today’s totalitarian states, such as Russia or North Korea, are best described with recourse to the SketchCop Facette facial recognition software used by international police...

Several people had told me this was a novel worth reading, and one of them had it sent from Amazon, so the trap was sprung and I walked right into it. Well, not exactly.  I’ve been around the block a few times, having savaged well over a thousand new books in my day, and the reviewer’s equivalent of Oscar Wilde’s dictum to the effect that only the very shallow do not judge by appearances is consequently never far from my mind. To judge a book by its cover is not an eccentric foible, it’s as close to a human right...

We have municipal elections coming up in Palermo, a feast of democratic disingenuousness that happens every five years when a raft of corpulent men with moustaches gets replaced, from the mayor on downwards, with another raft of corpulent men with moustaches.  There are posters of these hopefuls all about town, and my wife says the men in the photographs look like actors who have been asked to portray the Seven Deadly Sins – except, of course, there are many more than that number in the race, so every sin has about a dozen understudies. Some wear glasses, I’ve noticed, which...