A Political Refugee From The Global Village

Great Britain has been going through a new dark age since 1950 in the arts, ideas and writing. A fall-off much more striking than the simul...

I never read Robert Spencer but this review of his latest book  interests me very much. I have blogged before about the complete lack o...

The latest figures from the 2011 census are very important, alarming, saddening, but not really such a very great surprise.  10 percent...

Romanians have the smallest penises in Europe, figures show . Please don't attack me about this. I just read it in the paper and am p...

Whittacker  Chambers became a Communist in order to make the world a better place, along rational lines . What he said about Communism ap...

A telling story from today's Independent , by Alison Mutler, the AP woman here, about bribery in Romanian hospitals. Dr Cata...

"A nation is a group of people united by a common misunderstanding about their origins."  (Ernest Renan).  The current misun...

I never liked Jimmy Tarbuck, who has been arrested charged with sexual crimes. He summarised, in fact, everything in England I did not like...

I never wanted to visit Greece, had made up my mind against the place before I first came here in 2002, but I hoped I might like Athens, w...

The view from my hotel in Hydra, a Greek island where I am spending the Orthodox Easter. I was so lucky to get a boat ticket from Athe...

And vice versa. I owe this insight to Alain De Botton who said that his native Switzerland is boring but boring is another word for peac...

An interesting article today in several European newspapers written by the European Council on Foreign Relations ( ECFR ), a think ta...

Three churches in the heat yesterday with Mihai, within twenty miles of Bucharest. Cernica, Plătăreşti and  Negoiesti. Cernica I hav...

In dreams, unfamiliar buildings turn up in familiar landscapes and I, like many people, quite often dream of churches. Sunday was dreamlike...

A.J.P. Taylor, the greatest  twentieth century   English historian of modern Europe, was strongly opposed to England entering the European ...

Saturday began with the Villa Borghese and astonishing sculptures by Bernini. I wonder what feminists think of statues of rape. Actually I w...