October started badly for an afflicted Mexico, as Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in as president on the first day of the month. We were just having some respite, thinking that,…
For some months now, I’ve been feeling a certain urgency to read again Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. It would be the third time. Some fifteen years elapsed between my first…
Las elecciones en cualquier país y las campañas que les preceden, como hemos tenido oportunidad de observar ampliamente en los últimos meses, son trances contradictorios de la vida pública colmados…
...She came from Ireland, and in the tragedy of her personal story and that of her siblings she saw the embodiment of the tragedy of her country, suffocated by a…
After an unusually warm beginning of October, today (I’m writing this in the middle of the month) we woke up to a radiant, cold blue sky. Yesterday’s rain, which was…
An asthma crisis prevented me from going out and measuring directly in the streets the level of national enthusiasm or indignation. I wasn’t around any of the innumerable street parties…
The other day I fell prey to a dreadful thought: the more the 21st century moves forward, the less people there will be who’ve known the world without internet and…
Dear Anna and Phoebe, A few weeks ago, a friend and I went to the National Gallery in London to see a picture. Only the one, very specific, about which…
Delirium I’m sitting at The Whittington Stone pub in north London, watching the funeral procession of Queen Elizabeth II after the religious service at Westminster’s Abbey. The cortege has just…
From the day before I went on holiday this summer, I didn’t want to watch the news. I had the firm resolve to disconnect from any source of stress and…
Up to some eight thousand years ago, Great Britain was still joined to that which would become an expression of its strangeness once it became an island: the continent. I…