In between pints of Summer Lightning I’ve been reading bits of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s account of heresy in Spain, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles. Menéndez Pelayo does not allow himself the populist virulence of George Borrow’s anti-Papism, but one does have a delicious sense of scores being settled when he writes re Borrow’s dissemination of [...]

Glad to see the French are bemoaning the death of Cockney. There’s a lovely bit in George Borrow’s Romany Rye where he has moved into an inn in which
there was a barber and hair-dresser, who had been at Paris, and talked French with a cockney accent; the French sounding all the better, as no accent [...]

“They impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled”

George Borrow (1803-81), The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies in Spain (1841):
El vestit del Gitano varia amb el país que habita. Tant a Rosselló com a Catalunya consisteix la seva roba generalment d’una jaqueta, una armilla, pantalons, i un faixa vermella, que cobreix una part de l’armilla; en els peus porta sandàlies de cànem, [...]