• The Daily Telegraph
• Le Figaro
• The New York Post
• L’Orient-Le Jour
• L'Osservatore Romano
• The Irish Times
• Conservative Home
• The Jewish Chronicle

• FAZ / Eng.
• NZZ / Eng.
• Magyar Nemzet
• ABC.es
• The Catholic Herald
• Il Foglio
• London Playbook
• Financial Times

France

Mitteleuropa

Knickerbockers

Argentina

The Levant

Africa

Cape of Good Hope

Netherlands

Scandinavia

Québec

India

Muscovy

Germany

Depending on which writer you are speaking to, this can be an insular and tiresome subject — but Vargas Llosa does not disappoint.

The full list of Paris Review interviews can be found here.

■ At school my Latin teacher Dr Kernell used to describe a certain caste of individuals who cannot stand anything being different, fun, interesting, or enjoyable. He ascribed these people the moniker of “the Monotony Monitors”.

Amongst the many things the Monotony Monitors writhe in seething hatred of is Easter, primarily because it is the feast of Christ’s resurrection but also because its date is determined according to a formula based on the lunar calendar. This means it (and its dependent feasts) float through the year rather than being standardised in a monotonous way.

Eliot Wilson writes about the Easter Act 1928 which attempted to overthrow all the work of the Synod of Whitby and fasten the date of Easter in England’s civil calendar.

(It’s bad enough the Pagan English under their genial leader Harold Wilson effectively abolished the Whitsun holiday in 1965 by moving the Whit Monday day-off to the last Monday in May. This now bears the prosaic name of ‘Second May Bank Holiday’ or ‘Spring Bank Holiday’; not to be confused with the first Monday in May which is the ‘Early May Bank Holiday’.)

■ Lebanon is a beautiful land with ingenious inhabitants. Yasin Atlassi reports on how a divided country not much larger than Delaware managed to start its own space programme.

■ On the centenary of his birth, The Spectator recalls Ian Hamilton Finlay: the poet, sculptor, and gardener who maintained a private militia.

■ In Modern Age, Prof. Robert Whaples examines the dichotomy between David Copperfield and Holden Caulfield and concludes we are — alas — living in the age of the latter.

■ The United States of America does not have an honours system — except it does. Elijah Granet and I share many of the same obsessions, and he has penned an engrossing read on the quest for an American honours system.

Search