anythingarian bubbles and troubles from the land of the fretting nun
Foreign language tutors are quite common in lists of books banned by the Inquisition. Check for example this page in the 1844 Indice general de los libros prohibidos, which records the proscription in 1797 of a French-Spanish commercial correspondence course and of an English-Spanish conversation primer published in 1719 by the Anglican minister in Seville. [...]
Apart from the end of the English Shadow, last night I read JM Castellet’s Els escenaris de la memòria. JM was a literary critic, which is French for vulgar gossip, whose occasional qualms regarding the persecution of Jews and sexual non-conformists in Russia don’t seem to have stopped him attending any number of well-catered Soviet-sponsored [...]
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“I think the sherry trade could learn a lot from their cousins in Portugal. But of course that’s only if the sherry trade sees any benefit in visitors to their bodegas. I often wonder if they really do.” It’s the old Spanish paradox of shops whose owners seem prepared to go to quite extraordinary lengths to avoid selling you anything, unless that something is guaranteed to malfunction at the first opportunity. Experiences recounted last night of finally persuading a well known department store to relinquish a sewing machine which immediately jammed, the replacement literally falling to pieces whilst being bagged. Why?
A double reflection makes up the man who was born on the thirteenth day of the moon, lost his
throne on the thirteenth day of the moon, and fought the battle of Waterloo on the thirteenth day of the moon:
I wonder if Josephine’s astrological babblings didn’t cause Napoleon’s natural military interest in the moon to be unduly romanticised.
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