Category Archives: Miscelleneous
A necessary friendship
In 1954 When I was a one year old , my Spanish mother took me to see a bit of Royal pageantry near Buckingham Palace on the occasion of Emperor Haile Selassie’s state visit to the UK. So my mother told me many years later, she arrived to find that the crowds had built up, led by a line of uniformed English nannies with their young charges occupying the first row giving on to the main square from the side of St James’s Park. Undeterred, my mother gently moved her …
12 people who ruined Catalonia
From a haughty count to a tax fraudster, via a very vengeful dictator. By Jimmy Burns 9/29/15, 5:36 PM CET Updated 10/2/15, 11:54 AM CET As pro-independence parties win a majority in the local Parliament but fall short of 50 percent of the popular vote, we name 12 people responsible for Spain’s potential constitutional crisis. 1. Wilfred the Hairy: Perhaps the Knight of the White Moon who defeated Don Quixote on Barceloneta beach was really Wilfred the Hairy — Guifré el Pilós in Catalan. The legendary 9th Count of Barcelona, …
Diplomats to the core – how Oxford continues to ‘inoculate the world with Balliol’.
5 July 1997 It is 6pm and a group of young men and women are filing in orderly fashion into one of Oxford’s more discreet academic buildings for a lecture on the global politics of environment by a former UK ambassador to the UN. Well groomed, well dressed, and soft spoken, these students from around the world cut a very different image to those who have been crowding into the university’s most popular pub, The King’s Arms, to celebrate the end of their finals. For these are no ordinary students. …
