A Political Refugee From The Global Village

I was a very bookish child and my parents worried that I would live life at second-hand. I wonder if I did. Anyhow, when I was fourteen o...

I met a very nice Hungarian in Mercurea Ciuc who told me his two names were both Hungarian warrior names (one was Levente, the other I forg...

Bucharest used to be mostly shops like this fifteen years ago. I have watched the advance of progress here with dismay. Acknowledgements to...

Oddly, a couple of hours after seeing this picture on the Bucharest Realist Facebook page and hearing of Pasajul Englez, I accidentally...

"I've come here more times as prime minister than I've been anywhere other than Belgium."  - David Cameron , New Delhi ...

I'm beginning to get bored with reading about Islam in the news every day. Do others feel this way? Interesting though the subject was ...

I just found this quotation from Mircea Eliade. This is probably from his semi-fascist early phase but still it is good. “Until recently ...

"Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in moulding life than nationalism or a common language....

On October 1, four candidates to be Archbishop of Uppsala, the highest position in the (Lutheran) Church of Sweden, were interviewed by chu...

I wish Libya, Egypt and Iraq were still pro-British monarchies and I think Eisenhower's sabotage of the UK over the Suez intervention i...

The short answer is yes, of course. The quotations and the books show a man comparable to the Pitts, Fox, Disraeli or Dr. Johnson. He was a...

Which is the funniest book of all time in your opinion?  It might be Decline and Fall, Scoop or A Handful of Dust but it might be thi...

Hallowe'en is an ancient Catholic tradition but now just an excuse to make money and for American cultural imperialism. But whatever yo...

No-one knows what these paintings on the church tower at Csikrakos (Racu) mean. The tower is said to have been built in 1080 though no-...

The heart is the undiscovered country. You travel to a foreign country to discover your unconscious mind. Laurence Durrell said you have ...

This was first published in  Vivid  in 2004. Life in  Bucharest  has been transformed since the bloody events of December 1989 b...

I published this deeply irresponsible article in the Bucharest Daily News back in 2005 and it was and is a cri de coeur . Someone pointed o...

This is a very interesting article on sex in Iran, by Afshin Shahi in Foreign Policy . It shows how very Westernised Persians are, th...

I just came across this brilliant remark about Ireland by Hugh Trevor-Roper, thanks to Henry Hopgood-Phillips. I love it though though I kn...

This article first appeared in Vivid magazine in 2003 and the world it describes has changed enormously, but not completely beyond...