Author: Andrei Navrozov

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.

As I have noted here on a few occasions, good Catholics though they are, Italians are as distant from Christianity as any pagan.

Woke I’m not, nor have I ever been.

The lively discussion prompted by last week’s post, as well as the post itself, lacked an important ingredient, namely, some kind of connection to the present. A backward glance is all very well, but what of the Babbitts of today and tomorrow?

It is difficult to overestimate the influence of the all but forgotten Sinclair Lewis novel in the period between the two world wars, a stampede of adulation which culminated in the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to the author, the first American to receive it.

Yesterday was the thousandth day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I published an article on Newsmax entitled “1000 Days of Fratricide” and thought it might be a good idea to present its overarching contention here.

For my wife’s birthday the other week we took a trip to the countryside to visit a famous vineyard, with Giulio doing the driving. There was another couple to lunch, English people from Sussex, she a bubbly IT specialist, he a teacher at a school near Cambridge. His name was Larry and he said he taught drama.