The New Republic has published a long review of three novels by Georges Simenon. The thesis is that they are “are superb and polished works of art masquerading as pulp fiction.” Simenon wrote more than 400 novels, under his own name and various pseudonyms.
One of them, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, was published [...]

I’m not sure what possessed the editors of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung to add Somerset Maugham’s The Magician to their list of 50 great novels of the twentieth century. In the preface to the edition that I have, the author admits that when it was republished, he had not read the book in nearly fifty years. [...]

Yes, I know sometimes it seems as though my job here at AFoE is to lower the high-minded tone with discussion of inanities, but there’s another interesting story about the Eurovision Song Contest today, namely that Lebanon - who were intending to make their first entry into the competition this year - have now withdrawn [...]

The British edition of Body of Secrets, James Bamford’s second book about the US National Security Agency, gives equal billing to Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the subtitle, but that’s just marketing, making the home audience feel good. The same subtitle also alludes to Echelon, an eavesdropping program that was on its way to [...]

Two of the topics that produced some of the most posts on Fistful last year - the Eurovision Song Contest and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution - have come together. Of course, we already knew that this year’s contest would be in Kiev but now Ukraine has chosen ‘Razom nas bagato!’ (Together we are many!) by Greenjolly, [...]

Brings forth the fiftieth and last of its great novels of the twentieth century, a resolutely head-spinning inquisition of a book by Italo Calvino, one that keeps introducing a novel titled If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. In this, the coldest week in Munich in twenty years, the series not only takes notice of [...]

Heraclitis said that you can not step in the same river twice.
Wolfgang Pauli said that you can not be an identical fermion twice
that is that there can’t be two identical fermions.
Some Heraclitian said that you can’t step in the same river once.
This is clearly silly.
Similarly, I think that an honest application of the basic assumptions [...]

This sounds like it should be one of Harry Hutton’s Killer Facts but did you know that until tonight there’s never been a full stage production of The Sound Of Music performed in Austria? On top of that, the film has never been shown in Austrian cinemas (and only once on Austrian TV).
Which is a [...]

I would like to comment on an excerpt of a comment by Mike
“We might distinguish questions of fact (e.g. “which way will John vote at the next election?”) from questions of value (e.g. “is Blair’s outlook better than Brown’s?) by noting that the answers to factual questions may be true or false, but that the [...]

First I should say, as always, that I use blogs to write about things I know nothing about. So let me try to understand what cultural relativism might be.
Basically it begijns with the idea that should not judge other cultures. I think the origen might be with Herder who I try to [...]