My new year’s resolution for 2009 is to not recommend any book until I’ve finished it. That gives me a couple of weeks to indulge my particular blogging vice, and there’s no better place to start than Abraham B. Yehoshua’s wonderful A Woman in Jerusalem, which I can’t recommend highly enough even though I’m only […]
I don’t know if yesterday was particularly black but look at the dates in this chart of the worst days on the FTSE 100. It’s like, how much more black could this be? The answer is none – none more black. And only a few years ago the Onion was looking into even more precious […]
In a glowing portrait of Gordon Brown (who appears to be doing something about the crisis other than make soothing noises) in the latest Nie, there is the following quotable quote: “…unemployment in Great Britain is expected to reach a terrifying 6%, which is regarded here [UK] as a catastrophe. In Poland 11% of people […]
Gazeta Wyborcza continues its “Poland is no Country for Old People” series. The Onion was there first.
Back in September rumours spread in Ireland that one of the country’s biggest banks was close to going bust. Total nonsense, the experts said. Everything was A-OK. But the rumours persisted. On one radio talk show a caller pointed out that savings in the Post Office Bank were state-guaranteed in their entirety. Within hours millions […]
Dr. Grzegorz Makowski of the Institute for Public Affairs says that corruption is not the gigantic problem in Poland that everyone thinks it is. Among the reasons everyone thinks the problem is so bad is Transparency International. TI was a good idea but later “… TI began to sell it [its corruption index] as a […]
“Poland is no country for old people,” Gazeta Wyborcza announced on Friday, with much handwringing in a full page spread advertising an upcoming series of heartrending etc etc. The text continues: “You humiliate us You forbid us love and sex Fast cars You tell us to throw pots and make wall hangings Look after your […]
The Cellist of Sarajevo is Canadian novelist Steven Galloway’s third novel, but only the first to be published in the UK & Ireland. I picked up the novel enthusiastically (it’s beautifully put together, from the elegant cover through to the paging and paper-weight) but also with the slight apprehension that always accompanies a novel that […]
What really grabs attention in this belated companion piece to The Jam’s penultimate single The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had To Swallow), is just how little they have in common. In late 1982 as The Jam’s closing chapter saw them feted as real deal pop stars for the only time, an acrid sarcastic dirge was license for […]
It’s one of those ironies, that I was given a collection of Miriam Makeba’s music just last week – that is to say, a week before the South African artist died, suffering a heart-attack after having sung at a solidarity concert for Italian author Roberto Saviano (who is living under escort, after the Neopolitan mafia […]
