I first read Primo Levi in 1963. I picked up a second-hand copy of If This is a Man, a Four Square paperback published for two shillings and sixpence and which cost me (as we used to say it) one and six. I still have the book - now falling apart - with that second-hand [...]

A search for “Zimbabwe” on A Fistful of Euros currently yields:
No pages were found containing “zimbabwe”.
Not for much longer.
See the reports here and here respectively:
The EU is to increase the number of top Zimbabwean officials facing targeted sanctions by the end of February.
…..
The EU imposed travel sanctions on Mugabe’s regime in February 2002 [owing] to [...]

Over at normblog, which is where I more usually hang out, there is a character variously known as WotN and Wife of the Norm, and who is known in her own right as Ad?le. With a name like that she could be French but isn’t, and yet I feel it’s admissible to bring her over [...]

Yesterday I woke up and opened my front door to find a guy sitting on our garden wall playing a harmonica. Well, not in fact. Was it in a dream, then? No, not that either. It was a thought that just came into my head as I woke up and I lay there contemplating the [...]

This post is a follow-up to the one below on Hannah Arendt and the notion of the banality of evil. I fear, from one or two of the comments, that the reservations I expressed about her arguments may have led to misunderstanding. My point was certainly not to suggest that one shouldn’t try to understand [...]

[I'd like to start by thanking the Fistful of Euros team for inviting me to guest-blog here this week. I'm hoping to offer a mini-series on European thinkers, focusing on just an aspect of the ideas of the thinker I choose in each case. I say 'hoping to' because I still have to compose the [...]