This place of almost unequalled beauty used to be the smallest of the constituent republics of the former Yugoslavia. It borders on Serbia in the north/east, Abania to…
Category: Today
The ‘Indignants’ and Anarchy: what it is all about
We see on the daily news programmes that ‘Los Indignados’ have returned to the Puerta del Sol and the Plaza de Cataluña in Spain, and various other municipal…
Ian Fleming & the Count’s Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang
The suave inventor of James Bond had already suffered a heart attack at the age of 52 when he began writing about a magic motor car with rather…
The Cabinet System
Many students are accustomed to using the terms Prime Minister and The Cabinet and even The Cabinet Rooms in their studies and essays, but do not know much…
Going Olympic: countries that might
Very shortly you will watch the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games. Each country competing in the Games sends its athletes into the grand arena wearing blazers…
Sunday philosophy; the paralysing discomfort of air travel
Though more people travel regularly by air than ever before; while international airports spring up at vast cost though not required (Spain has recently built two particularly pungent…
Six men shaken, but not stirred, nothing but a dream
The admiral standing erect near the double entrance doors of the Connaught Hotel in Carlos Place is dressed as a doorman. No-one dares think of him as a…
Fabled motorcars: a personal reminiscence
Now in 2012, they would be called ‘jalopies’, or ‘old crocks’, but in their epoch, some of the motorcars I have met driven were notoriously expensive, fast and…
Plain English
What is plain English? What it is not is only too obvious, and can be read in all British bureaucratic communication, business letters, government departments, and sadly, much…