Matthias Matussek, once London correspondent of Der Spiegel and now its culture editor, not to mention brother of top diplomat Thomas Matussek, has a book out. Wir Deutschen: warum die anderen uns gern haben können is meant to be a call for a renewed German patriotism and pride in culture. This would usually suggest a [...]

This anniversary guest post was written by the indispensable Jérôme Guillet, who normally writes for The European Tribune.
Laurence Parisot, the head of MEDEF, the French business
organisation, recently complained that:

There is one word who meaning for the public has changed in the past 25 years: “reform”. It used to be synonymous with progress, and now it [...]

A few months back, I picked up, on a lark, a short French novel called Allah Superstar authored by the pseudonymous Y.B. (generally known to be Yassir Benmiloud, columnist for the Algerian daily El Watan). I bought it entirely on the basis of the excerpt on the back cover:
Une fatwa, voilà ce qu’il [...]

There is not much market for reviews of books published almost a decade and a half ago, so without further ado, my thoughts on The Prize, by Daniel Yergin. This evaluation is overdue because I started reading the book when I bought it, back in 1997. I put it down around page 400 (which is [...]

The New York Times’ Jeff Z. Klein decided to go to Germany early so he could tell his travelling countrymen how to best organize their trip to and through Germany during the football world cup next month. Now he’s all figured it out, and it’s easy: If You’re going to “The World Cup’s World Class [...]

Sorry, this is not a post proclaiming a political theory of everything. It’s a note saying “‘Tis done!” I picked up Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World sooner than I thought and finished it up right quick.
Previous posts on the Baroque Cycle are here, here, here and here. The argument of the trilogy and [...]

I’m probably the last blogger still reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, and chances are good that I won’t take on the third part, The System of the World, immediately after finishing the second, The Confusion. Not because the books aren’t good, just that it is a lot to read consecutively.
The good news is that the [...]

I just put up a post on the economic situation of Finland. Now I am putting another. Why the sudden interest? What is there about the Finnish economy which could be of interest to more people than the five million or so who actually live there?

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With Turkish accession one of the most important issues facing the European Union, people interested in the question could do much worse than read these two recent, and reasonably short, books that focus on the country: Crescent and Star, by Stephen Kinzer, and The Turks Today, by Andrew Mango. Both illustrate and explain contemporary Turkey, [...]

Italy posted a trade deficit with the rest of the world of 1.354 billion euros in April, widening sharply from a deficit of 155 million euros in the same month of 2004, national statistics office ISTAT said on Thursday. The deficit also increased from March, when it stood at 845 million euros.
Trade with European Union [...]