Lord Weidenfeld, a notable asylum seeker, on Muslim immigrants

Lord Weidenfeld the publisher is dead, another famous party-thrower whom I never met. I never was a social climber and this is something I regret. He was short, fat and ugly and hugely successful with women. I remember he is said to have told Barbara Amiel as a chat-up line

I am the Diaghilev of cunnilingus.

My source is probably Private Eye and certainly unreliable.

I am more of a fan of his (inactive) partner, the late Nigel Nicolson, who was a very good writer like his father, Sir Harold Nicolson. Weidenfeld achieved a lot, but the reason why I am blogging about him is because of an interview he gave on BBC Radio 4 in March last year. Among other things, he said that if things became hard for them as a result of anti-Semitism 

Jews could go to Israel but...the rest?

Cologne changes everything

I am very pleased that migrants committed the Cologne mass sexual assaults this New Year's Eve and not in two or three years' time, when millions more refugees had been admitted to Europe. The same logic makes me grateful that Muslim fanatics murdered many innocent people in Paris in November, rather than waiting ten years. 

Cologne might be of lasting and huge significance to European history. Europe, or rather

Algiers is uncooked

I thought of several distant countries to visit at Christmas time when nothing happens for two or three weeks. In the end England seemed more appealing and a short-haul or medium haul trip to somewhere warm on Boxing Day. I was resigned to going somewhere unadventurous like Malta when suddenly I thought of and immediately decided on Algeria. Looking it up I found that not only was it pretty cheap to get to but, to my disgust, Her Majesty’s Government no longer advised her subjects not to visit. Only the great south, the Sahara, was to be avoided.

For countries to be interesting they must, of course, fulfil two criteria. Getting a visa should be difficult and/ or time consuming and, when you tell people you are going there, they should warn you that you might be killed. Algeria fulfilled both these two.