When I first came to Belgium, one of the things that genuinely surprised me is how people seem to think Buffy, the Vampire Slayer is a children’s programme. Admittedly, the title doesn’t exactly say “socially relevant drama”, but I doubt that the show’s success on American TV would have been possible without the age [...]

Over on Crooked Timber, Maria Farrell has some thoughts on the coming Irish EU Presidency and why the presidencies of small countries seem to get more achieved than those of the large countries. (She’s following on from this FT article)
The whole post is well-worth reading and I heartily recommend it, but she ends with an [...]

For some reason, I stopped covering the constitution when I started AFOE. Since Cosmocrat has been on hiatus for two months, and Henry Farrell after joining CT generally restricts himself to subjects the US bloggers care about, there’s barely been any informed discussion of these things in the blogosphere, that I know of. That’s a [...]

“The EU report on anti-Semitism that the EU decided to shelve has been leaked to the Jerusalem Post, and is available here.” Via Eugene Volokh, and the Head Heeb. Neither them nor I have read it yet.
There’s undoubtedly anti-semitism in European countries. Speaking of Europe as one entity here is inappropriate, by the way.
There’s [...]

Thanks David for the link. I haven’t commented on this because like Dutch finance minister Zalm (who I imagine working away weblogging into the early hours under a dim light provided only by his mobile phone) I am tired. I can’t help feeling that everything that needs to be said has already been said, and [...]

A few months ago I came across an old book that my grandmother had been left by her grandmother. Called ‘Geography for Children On A Perfectly Easy Plan’ it dates from 1856 (first printed 1848) and is a British geography school textbook, educating children on each country in the world, its inhabitants and its economy. [...]

David is right. Islamist terrorism has now finally reached Europe for real.
Not just because the tragic terrorist attacks against the Neve-Shalom and Beth-Israel Synagogues took place in the undisputedly European part of Istanbul. Not just because the fear of a rising tide of al-Qaida triggered fundamentalist terrorism could once again lead to a round [...]

Posting under the header: ‘More Signs That We Are In the Twentieth Century After All’ my young Argentinian co-blogger notes crypically “I don’t know what a XIXth (or XXth) century englishman would say, if we told him that English unions would one day protest against losing skilled jobs to India”……… adding…………”and, in the heels [...]

I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before, but it was only while talking with a colleague this afternoon, and being asked what I thought about the unwillingness of the candidate countries to reform that it came to me: with all this coming and going on the Pact, what kind of message is being [...]

The sinking of a boatload of Somali immigrants off the island of Lampedusa seems to have set off something akin to a feeling of collective remorse in Italy. (Would that the human tragedy that is occuring on a regular basis just off the straits of Gibraltar could provoke a similar reaction here in Spain!) Indeed [...]