“The Parallel has tree faces,” writes Max Aub in Campo cerrado, “day, night, and Sunday morning.” The Parallel–crammed with artistes and whores–was a key location in the rise of the anarchist gangsters for whom Orwell fought, yet the Church of England’s favourite anarchist seems to have missed it and various other crucial locations on the […]

Cars and chariots of death.

Homage to Catalonia achieved the double-whammy of focusing attention on the Stalinist terror that followed the 1937 coup while whitewashing the merciless anarchist repression here in 1936. With the heroic optimism that often accompanies foreign jaunts, Orwell seems to have approved wholeheartedly–although never in public, my dears!–of the slaughter or exile of the Catalan clergy […]

Orwell biographer DJ Taylor wants to dig up the common of Southwold, a quiet Suffolk seaside resort, in order to find a time capsule that Orwell allegedly buried there 70 years ago. If found, I suspect that it will not contain a bucket and spade.

When we went down to the beach last Saturday to see how much of it had survived last week’s storms, a little old man was sitting on the wooden decking of the walkway drinking beer. We sat next to him and exchanged pleasantries while he finished one can and opened another. Thus emboldened, our Cordovan […]

Those of you with a memory longer than those interesting socks your boss is wearing this morning may remember that I pointed out in May that Rafael Ramos, La Vanguardia’s correspondent in London, appeared to be semi-literate, prone to invention, and a plagiarist. When I complained to the paper’s ombudsman, Josep Maria Casasús, he emailed […]

Elections are still taken too seriously in Spain and Spain is still too monocultural for there to have arisen a tradition of mock-millenialist non-conformist participants such as Holland’s Rapaille Partij and Britain’s Monster Raving Loonies. And this probably isn’t going to change anytime soon: judging by its mistakes, this Sant Cugat election poster (click it!) […]