Category: Wednesday’s Child

I met Ghislaine Maxwell in the 1980’s, when she was still working with her father, socialist tycoon and fraudster Robert Maxwell.

The world outside my windows is so full of malign omens that today I shall be looking inward, or rather downward.

Another scorching Sicilian summer is nearing its apogee in Ferragosto, while newspaper hacks the world over revel in the start of the silly season.

I hasten to point out that any debt owed by the title of this post to André Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs ought to be discounted, apart from novel’s premise, self-evident enough, that some things in the world are original and some fake.

That, at any rate, is what Cloudflare asks me to do by checking the little box. “Human,” in its system of values, is the opposite of “robot,” which, we are led to believe, is unable to rise to the challenge at this stage of its development.

The highest summer temperature ever recorded on the continent of Europe is 48.8 C, or 119.8 F, logged at Syracuse in Sicily on August 11, 2021.

The Feast of St. Rosalia, which a couple of days ago was celebrated in Palermo for the 401st time since the Church had assigned it to the plague-curing Saint, is above all a noisy affair.

In a fit of nostalgia, which is another name for a moment of historical clarity, one may gaze into the distance that separates the Mitford sisters from the Kardashian sisters.

I am well accustomed to there being no money in the house, but recently something seems to have changed. In the old days I used to joke…

In the 1956 American musical comedy, The Girl Can’t Help It, the music promoter played by Tom Ewell gets the shock of a lifetime when the girl of the title, Jayne Mansfield, sings beautifully in the closing scene of the film.