Author: Andrei Navrozov

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…

The new year is quietly making its way homeward through desert sands and Siberian snows. As I’m already under the benign influence of Bacchus and his band of merry satyrs in pointy crimson hats, this post may end up somewhat askew, like a picture put up by an Irish workman in an English house.

I’m not personally acquainted with Mrs. Assad, but I’m sure she’s a perfectly nice woman who just happened to be an accomplice of a historically significant war criminal. I could well have met her – she had been living in London until 2000, when she met her future husband and moved to Damascus – as I had many Arab friends at the time. The point is that accomplices of criminals, and on occasion the criminals themselves, are often perfectly nice people.