A Political Refugee From The Global Village

George Saintsbury  Here is an interesting list of ' the top ten literary beards ranked in order of increasing aweso...

Getting a computer at home that was not connected to the internet simply led me to reread old newspaper articles that I had saved on it. In...

Until a year or so ago I had never seen a  woman in Bucharest wearing a Muslim headscarf. The head-scarves Romanian peasant women wear are ...

This story deserves as much coverage as possible. Think about it. A man called Alex Cline is being prosecuted simply for calling an MP a c...

H.R.H. the Duchess of Cambridge is in labour as I write this. I pray that she is delivered of a healthy prince and we can forget, for a gen...

Two stories in today's papers fill me with dread.  The  Independent today is exercised about the choice of a former Playboy model a...

Lonely Planet is always spamming me with things - of course I could unsubscribe but I like being reminded of travel possibilities when I ...

I spent a wonderful long weekend in Istanbul, which I do not quite have the courage to call Constantinople, even though an  other worldly p...

In 1990 when I took a traın journey to Constantınople and fell ın love wıth Romanıa I had planned a day ın Adrıanople or Edırne but dıd ...

Apparently today is American independence day. a day to remember the brave patriots who fought and in many cases died or were exiled for th...

9% of British people under 25 are Muslim, according to the 2011 Census, which, incidentally, will be the last census in the United Kingdom....

I admire Roy Hattersley for (only) two things. For liking ironing (do I believe him?) and for opposing abortion. He said that as an atheist...

The Queen's Birthday Party at the Bragadiru Palace was enormous fun on Tuesday evening, much more so than the ones Robin Barnett, the l...

We come fresh to the different stages of life, and in each of them we are quite inexperienced, no matter how old we are.  Rochefoucauld...

I see from the Daily Telegraph obituaries , read on my telephone in a swelteringly hot Turkish restaurant in the back streets of Bucharest,...

My young feminist (and militant atheist) woman friend, posted to Riyadh, says Saudi girls tell her it is the best place in the world to be ...

My friend Sarah last year wrote  one of her enchanting blog posts  about tonight, the night of the Sânziene.   It puts me in mind o...

Frederic Harrison said his first memory was of his father paying a very rare visit to the nursery and saying,  'Frederic, I am going...

Sabine Baring-Gould once said to a little girl at a children's party: 'Tell me, whose lovely little girl are you?' She replied...

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else th...