A Political Refugee From The Global Village

To my American friends celebrating Thanksgiving I wish them a happy occasion and remind them of a joke of Garrison Keillor, whom I love.  ...

According to Harold Macmillan's diary, Winston Churchill told his cabinet in January 1955 that Keep England White  would be a good...

I thought walking through the streets between Cismigiu and Buzesti, decaying 1880s buildings, trees bright brown with autumn leaves, that B...

I remember my history master of genius, Dr Alan White, mentioned this history exam question 'Asquith was the last British Prime Min...

I was on a bus - my ticket cost $1- going from Palmyra to Damascus and they were showing a BBC thriller with Arabic subtitles. TV in a bus ...

Romanian women can be dangerous but the two most dangerous were in fact ethnic Hungarians.  So it is said at least. I have blogged befo...

I told my boiled egg story just now for the first time in over 20 years and Andrei at the office laughed uncontrollably. Apart from him and...

"The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy." Wittgenstein "The happiest moment of the hap...

"This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to ...

Mr. Ponta said on television a few minutes ago that he was "handing in my mandate, I'm resigning, and implicitly my government t...

Bucharest is very deeply moved indeed by the deaths in the Colectiv nightclub. Tonight large well-behaved crowds line Bulevard Unirii an...

Still on the them of Hallowe'en, vampires and ghosts, the line in Hamlet Act 1 Scene 5,  "I am thy father's spirit"  w...

It was announced today that Mr. Guenter Schabowski, who by mistake opened the Berlin Wall and ended the Cold War, has died at 86. It seems ...

Bucharest is a tiny place - despite its 1.9 million inhabitants everyone knows everyone or so it seems. Three friends of friends of mine...

I stayed in the Hotel Continental in Cluj once, in 2004, in a beautiful first floor room overlooking the square. Patrick Leigh Fermor drank...

This is an interesting article by an Anglican clergyman, written in 2009, headlined Britain is no longer a Christian nation. The Rev. P...

I have been saying that, unlike the disastrous chaos in Iraq and Libya, the war in Syria cannot be blamed on the USA, the UK or France. It...

This week we learnt that 710,000 asylum seekers have arrived in the EU so far this year. 38% were (apparently) Syrians. This is an histori...

The author of the Confessions [of a Window-Cleaner, etc.] series was a Cambridge man. Who knew? Christopher Wood died at the same time as...

I love Arab cities. I love that certain smell they have. TAROM in February had a special offer selling return tickets to most of its desti...