If challenged to a game of Word Association, top of my list of responses to "Berlin" would not be "Morality"; in fact it would be hard-pressed to make it as high as the bottom of my list. Dietrich (The Blue Angel), Liza with a Zee (Cabaret) and Political Movement with a Zee (every war movie between…
Obama, Join The Circus!
I read everything that John Le Carre ever wrote until he, like Paul Simon, went African. His Cold War novels had me chained to the page. Who could forget the very end of the Quest for Karla Trilogy as Smiley's People, the last in the series, draws to a close? Spoiler Alert - you may be about to…
What’s in a name?
The first poem I studied in secondary school began: "The pig lay on a barrow dead, motionless". Poet Laureate Ted Hughes' ensuing nine sickeningly graphic, non-rhyming stanzas made me want to vomit and scuppered any chance that Wordsworth, Byron or Shelley might offer the key to my romantic soul. It was not surprising, therefore, that the death of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney a…
Reindeer in the headlines
Oslo is not the capital of Sweden, and that nice King Harald, who has his photograph taken once a year handing out coveted prizes to clever people, is not the King of Sweden. Harald is King of Norway, which is just as well really as he lives in Oslo which is the capital of Norway (and…
Georgia on my mind
When, on August 16, I saw the announcement that Bert Lance had died, memories of the disappointments of that period of my life known as "coming-of-age" came flooding back. Lance was a Georgian banker (born 82 years ago a little closer to Atlanta than Tbilisi) who took the train up from the South to Washington when Jimmy (pronounced Jimmuh)…
Till IRS Do Us Part
My first coherent memory is of an event 50 years ago this month when Ronnie Biggs and his South London mates pulled off the Great Train Robbery - a straight, plain vanilla crime involving stopping a mail train (hence the title), coshing the poor driver and making off with the booty (two and a half…
Judge for yourself
Silvio Berlusconi has a mission. Having already successfully nobbled two branches of government - the executive and legislature - he is out gunning for the third. In a speech that in any other country would have had him up in front of the Beak accused of incitement, the newly convicted (this one's for tax evasion) former…
The life and times of Prince George
The late editor of Punch, Alan Coren, informed a friend after his first golf lesson that it was " a hideous, hideous game and, as for the bunkers, it was no wonder that Hitler died in one." Following the communique at the end of the G20 meeting in Russia last week, it remains to be seen…
Crime and Punishment
Of all the words that have made it across the much-trampled terrain of Western Europe and the inhospitable waters of the Channel into the welcoming arms of the English language, one of the most improbable must be "Schadenfreude". Adopted into the language after the defeat of Germany in the First World War and the imposition of punitive reparations, it…
Populist leaders are ruled. OK?
Never one for crosswords or brain teasers, in my younger days I got my quiz kicks from lineups of leaders at G7 Economic Summits. Always familiar were the Presidents of the US and France, the Chancellor of Germany and the Prime Minister of the UK. The Canadian premier would generally give himself away by the jutting jaw honed…
Tax Break 