The church bells of Italy, l’Italia dei campanili, are ringing in Christmas, and though my own Christmas is two weeks on and the Orthodox bells ring so differently, I heartily wish that the melodious concatenation reaches the gentle reader.
No, it isn’t a mistake, my title. It’s not like I don’t read the papers, you know. But in the stuffy atmosphere of Tory triumphalism, I think, the gentle reader may well be wishing for a window on the world to be opened. So what really happened in Britain last week? Well, basically, the two main political parties have exchanged roles, which is not, moreover, entirely a bad thing. It’s both good news and bad. Let me start with the good news. A number of pollsters analyzing the general election have spoken of a new divide in British society, as...
Put simply, over the last twenty years the story of civil liberties in Russia has run in parallel with Solomon Grundy’s. That arrest there has now become virtually synonymous with prosecution, and prosecution with conviction, is evidence stark enough for any man of good will, but periodically a legal case comes to light for which the starkness is merely a charming background. This week it is the case of one Egor Zhukov, a 21-year-old university student who was arrested in July during the street demonstrations in Moscow. As evidence the judge was shown a police videotape of a young man...
Apart from mudslinging at Prince Andrew for his alleged peccadillos, first sexual and now financial, British newspapers are occupied with exposing the “anti-Semitism” of Jeremy Corbyn. “What will become of Jews and Judaism in Britain if the Labour Party forms the next government?” asked Britain’s Chief Rabbi in what the Times of Israel has described as “an unprecedented intervention into partisan politics.” As in the case of Prince Andrew, discussed in this space last week, I’m not an admirer of Corbyn. In fact, I would go as far as to say that should Labour win the general election next Thursday...
The private plane used for delivering women to Epstein was known as the Lolita Express, with reference to Nabokov’s third-rate novel. The same bien pensants who admire the book are among the first to sling mud at Epstein’s shadow, but it is the still wider landscape of morality that makes a nonsense of their hypocritical censoriousness.
Guardia di Finanza has made a lot of headlines over the last few years by ambushing unsuspecting citizens as they left fancy hotels like La Poste in Cortina d’Ampezzo and luxury shops like Prada in Palermo – as well as expensive restaurants, sports car dealers, cigar emporia, men’s tailors, furriers, jewelers, and so on, ordering hapless shoppers to disclose the source of funds that brought upon them the iniquity of spending
A friend of mine died last week. Maybe not a friend, more of an acquaintance, but so monumental were the man’s life and works that my desire to stand for a moment in his shadow is easily understood. These gradations of intimacy – close friend, friend, acquaintance, passing acquaintance, somebody whose book you’ve read, somebody with whom you once shared a seat in a train carriage – are actually quite tricky. It comes down to knowing a person, but when does one really know someone? Cases are a dime a dozen when fathers and sons, and even more commonly husbands...
Gustav Mahler once said that if the public thinks a conductor’s tempo too slow, what he ought to do is to slow it down. Such, anyway, is Wednesday’s Child’s feeble justification for persisting with the theme of the past two weeks, which is the plight of the socially anomalous child East and West. The occlusive membrane separating the home from the state, if one exists and is not ruptured by intrusion of the latter, is in most cases a good thing, indeed one of the condiciones sine quibus non of child rearing. But then, of course, there are cases when...
My post last week occasioned a lively discussion. Not all of it was on point – divertingly, I was made to learn the meaning of “small ball” and “on base percentage” – but let us press on in more or less the same vein. As the gentle reader may recall, last week’s post involved a man in a Russian village who stands to lose his children because one of them has taken up crocheting and there is no television in the family home. For those who wish to follow the story, the man’s name is Ivan Sidorov and the village,...
A curious thing happened some days ago in the village of N– . Nineteenth-century writers were exacting about sparing the localities where their narratives unfolded a likely embarrassment of disclosure, while at the same time saving their audience from fatigue attendant on superfluous knowledge. Hoping that my own gentle reader may one day reward me, if only by renewing his subscription, I shall now adopt this antiquated practice. At first glance the tiny village, with a population of just over a thousand, seems a bucolic and tranquil sort of place, but facts show that it is in fact a human...
