Author Archives: Jimmy Burns

New book on Spain research: Bilbao Revisited

Posted on February 3, 2011 in the News category

My recent stay in Bilbao is the subject of a blog elsewhere on this site. It was alsoeported in Althetic Club of Bilbao’s magazine. An no, I haven’t been recruited by ETA. I just love Basque food and wine, the company of friends, andd local football’s deep cultural roots and enduring belief in home-grown talent.

Bilbao Revisited

Posted on February 3, 2011 in the Football category

Just back from a visit to Bilbao as part of my latest wonderings through Spanish football (theme of a new book I am working on). This City is much altered since I first visited it on a ferry from England some thirty years ago. The air is much cleaner, it’s got one of the best public transport systems in the world, and its river is a joy to walk along now the Guggenheim gleams nears its banks and there’s a Calatrava bridge joining one side of the city with the …

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Shakira cule

Posted on January 26, 2011 in the Football category

My candidate for the best news of the week is a report in the Spanish media today that Shakira is thinking of buying a house in Catalonia where her sister already lives. The beautiful, talented, and engaging Columbian star is one of my favourite singers and dancers and it will be great to see more of her along with my regular visits to the Nou Camp. A real bonus would be her finding a house she likes in Sitges where I like to take my holidays and have many friends. …

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Good sense prevails at The Garrick

Posted on January 25, 2011 in the Misc category

So the  Garrick Club, my beloved and enduring watering hole and eaterie will not ban ladies from its totemic central table, after all. Thank God,  reason has prevailed. Due to unavoidable work commitments, I was sadly unable  to attend last night’s special meeting of members which voted against a  motion that endeavoured to get round  the Equalities Bill, by making the table ‘members only’, thus excluding women who are guests but not full members . Women guests have been granted gradual access to previously restricted  areas of the club in …

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Journalists:get your own house in order

Posted on January 25, 2011 in the Misc category

There are sectors of the British media that take to exposing the alleged sins of the world with unashamed gusto. From parliamentary expenses to Vince Cable’s ministerial gaffe, not to mention the countless invasions into the privacy of other individuals – often in apparent violation of what or may not judged contempt of court. The media are less comfortable when their own less reputable actions become the focus and target of attention. The Murdoch stable can thus not be best pleased with the growing controversy over the alleged hacking of …

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Vince Cable’s Gaffe

Posted on December 23, 2010 in the Uncategorized category

With most cabinet ministers  now heading to their Christmas hideaways, it will be interesting to see to what extent the Telegraph stories of subversive Liberal Democrats  within the coalition has the life-span of an unpopular  panto or has , as they put it in the world of newspaper hacks,  ‘legs’ i.e. endurance. In a sense the damage has already been done on two fronts. Firstly if has left Vince Cable as a lame duck cabinet minister- his reputation for speaking out on matters others fear to tread fatally compromised by …

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Snow Prayer

Posted on December 20, 2010 in the Religion category

So you haven’t been able to buy presents , quite on the industrial  scale of previous years, or you might have missed an extra  day or two at work, or the car you were driving is now abandoned on some minor road somewhere between Bath  and Oxford, or your flight to some place in the sun has been grounded, and you’ve slept your last night , not in  a manger, but on the hard floor of a crowded terminal. Well I can’t remember the last time I woke, as I did …

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Irish Diary

Posted on December 18, 2010 in the Uncategorized category

I was in Dublin last weekend, talking about my latest book Papa Spy at the Cervantes Institute, in an event jointly organised , and charmingly so, by the Hispanic  department at Trinity College with a helping hand from former FT colleague Manchester-based Alice Owen, who works as a free-lance publicist. There was a great turn-out of new fans and old friends, led by author and former Irish Times journalist Paddy Woodworth, who knows a fair bit about Spanish culture and history and generously agreed to be ‘in conversation’ with me. …

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Football’s Globe Trotters?

Posted on December 13, 2010 in the Football category

FC Barcelona are making their Spanish League wins look so easy that they are in danger of becoming football’s equivalent of the Harlem Globe Trotters. For those of you unfamiliar with the HBT, they are the legendary basketball team that became just so skilful and so much better than any of their rivals that at one point they decided just to focus on exhibition matches- with a bit of theatrics thrown in- as there was  no point in pretending there was any competition capable of beating them. They became very successful, …

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My Book of the Month is Giles Tremlett’s Catherine of Aragon

Posted on December 10, 2010 in the New Books category

Catherine of Aragon is not a name that slips easily off the lips of most English schoolboys, unless they’ve been educated as Catholics, still a minority breed. Few early students of English history have failed to memorise where she was in the Tudor pecking order: ‘divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, and survived. ’ Oh yes, Catherine was the one who was divorced first. Of Henry V111’s eight wives, it is Catherine who has endured in the collective memory of the English people, arguably for the wrong reasons. Catherine was mythified …

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