When the Fiske half of my family immigrated to England, we weren"t exactly popular. We arrived at the coast in boats and disgorged en masse only to be met "with spear tips and sword blades," according to the contemporary account. Things were different in those days. Luckily we were ...
A year ago, in the wake of yet another American High School massacre"this time by a half-British shooter"I wrote a contentious article on gun control here. I made what seemed to me a reasonable case for increased gun control in the U.S. and spoke as an Englishman who has shot all his life, ...
In 2004 in rural Berkshire, England, a rush-hour commuter train from London to Plymouth collided with a stationary car at a level crossing and all eight carriages, bearing two hundred people, were derailed. Both the driver of the car, the driver of the train, and four passengers died at the scene, ...
As the British press draw themselves bloated and bloody-faced from their feeding frenzy on the slaughtered marriage of the "domestic goddess" Nigella Lawson to advertising titan Charles Saatchi, I was struck by how this duel in open court between two supposedly dexterous manipulators of the ...
Driving around Spain, one notices all the castles. That’s quite a thing to notice for an Englishman such as myself, as we have thousands of them. But on Spain's freeways they seem to spring up on the horizon with hourly regularity along with monasteries and nunneries. Religion means ...
In 2009 I first came to Pamplona to run with the bulls. I was terrified in that complete and overwhelming way that total ignorance brings, standing on a street corner and waiting for death to come. I comported myself honorably but not brilliantly and did so again two days later before boarding a ...
My friend Hugh Dancy came to London this week while on a break before filming a series about that least friendly of fictional characters, Thomas Harris’s serial killer Hannibal Lecter. One of Harris's characters calls Lecter “a pure sociopath…it’s so rare to get one ...
Last week I drove from Seville to Ronda, its great rival for primacy in the bullfighting world. Accompanying me was the noted son of that town, Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez. Cayetano, a former matador, has retired from bullfighting to move onto other projects, and I am slowly following suit. So ...
Last week I gave a talk on my pet topic of bullfighting in front of various politicos from Spain and Britain at the Reform Club in London, which was founded in 1836 in the wake of the Great Reform Act of "32 that was the first step toward universal enfranchisement in Britain. The most ...
Returning to London from Seville I see that abortion is once again one of the top news stories in what the Spanish still refer to as the Anglo-Saxon world: in the US, Ireland, and even Australia. Here in Britain we seem to be much more sanguine about it, which is a function of our relative lack of ...
