This is surely where this took place, and this must have been one of the last guests pre-mortem. I liked the unconsciously gruesome comments on TripAdvisor about the chilly welcome and subsidence on the tennis court, and a couple of the photos are thoroughly spooky.

Peter Mandelson on how fortunate we are that the European Commission is unelected, remote, unaccountable, and a major bureaucracy.

An anti-intellectual French horticultural fable.

A Google Maps/Le Figaro mashup.

Fill in the gaps in this pasquinade on the voiceless velar fricative, which I found last night in Mesonero Romanos’ El antiguo Madrid:
En la plaza hay un cartel
Que nos dice en castellano
Que José, rey italiano,
Roba a España su dosel;
Y al leer este cartel,
Dijo una maja a su majo:
–Manolo, pon ahí abajo
Que me C….. en [...]

Half roasted Frenchmen, some o’er Gratings Broil’d/Do mix with Spaniards in the Sea parboil’d;

Between-wars texts about Zaragoza by Germans who appear never to have visited the place.

Proud English cock, limp Latin hen: the binary opposition of English and Spanish fowls as a metaphor for the contrast between growing British military might and declining Spanish power.

Nominations for the noblest British fighter in a Spanish war, and speculative revisions of the history of two idiot idioms.

Xenophobic atavism in the 1640 Reapers Revolt.

• French farmer tells him, “Get off my land!”
• Did a Pakistani Dracula turn Brad and Angelina into zombies?

After years of shilly-shallying, will France finally stand up to American fartpower?

“They will respect neither the putrefied corpses of high whores nor the imbecilic devotion of the wage earner to his master’s money.”

The French left’s anti-racism proxy appears to have lost control of its Spanish entity, which appears to have lost sight of whatever idealism it may have once had.

A fascinating ethnic map of 1920 Paris, and the suggestion that the metropolis was colonised by the provinces rather than vice versa.

When they were detained by the Médoc gendarmes, Georges and Frédéric had the grave misfortune to have in their possession a sack containing ten succulent little bundles of spines. Turning its face from all that the British cherish in France, the criminal court in Bordeaux put animal protection above lavish family meals and fined these [...]

T Bell, MD, Kalogynomia, or the laws of female beauty (1821):
Professor Blumenbach of Göttingen, whose profound science and perfect impartiality no one can doubt, does not hesitate to say, that the English are the most beautiful people on the globe. Nor is this wonderful when we consider that ENGLAND, perhaps exclusively, presents the combination [...]

The other day, on this walk, an elderly Englishman from G. Speaking with an Andalusian accent, he claimed to be one of a group of Brits who, following the abortive Algiers putsch (aka putsch des généraux) against De Gaulle in 1961, fled the Marseilles barracks of the French Légion étrangère and crossed the Pyrenees to [...]

Dave has kindly sent me the URL of the online version of a superb book packed with brilliant photos, The story of the Tour de France by Bill and Carol McGann, who in their spare time run Torelli, a Californian racing gear import business. Dave liked the blinding of Honoré Barthélémy story quoted in the [...]

Having a gunwoman riding pillion on the scooter seems a good idea, rather like female coxes in boat racing. One can imagine few worse distractions from one’s enduring preoccupation with road safety than having some big sweaty guy fiddling with his gun behind one’s back.