Kindness Can Kill

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 "€œwith spear tips and sword blades,"€ according to the contemporary account. Things were different in those days. Luckily we were better armed and better trained than the defending Anglo-Saxon army, and having killed their leader, Byrhtnoth, Earl of Essex, we took control of the region, East Anglia. Most of us Danes, it seems from genetic studies, returned home in the decades following this victory in 991 A.D., but my family did ...

Nigella Lawson

The Kiss-Off

As the British press draw themselves bloated and bloody-faced from their feeding frenzy on the slaughtered marriage of the "€œdomestic goddess"€ Nigella Lawson to advertising ...

The Starch in the Social Fabric

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 ...

A Paean to Pamplona

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 ...

He Who Would Battle Monsters

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 ...

Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles

The Second-Hand Men

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 ...

The Freedom of Disunity

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 Difference Between Killing and Murder

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 ...

Ollie Locke

Among the Gold and Gore

Last night while seated in the La Maestranza bullring of Seville to watch the great matador José Marí Manzanares dance with and dispatch six bulls, I was reminded why I ...

Pekingese

The Ancient Contract Between Man and Wolf

The incident reads like a sick contemporary rewrite of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. A fourteen-year-old girl sat down to eat a meat pie in the kitchen of a friend's house where ...

David Cameron and Boris Johnson

Another Battle Lost on the Playing-Fields of Eton

Referring to his most famous victory at the educational establishment he and so many of his officers attended, the Duke of Wellington is alleged (some say incorrectly) to have ...

Barnaby Conrad

Dying in Hemingway’s Shadow

In 1941, in the plaza de toros of Mexico City, a nineteen-year-old audience member made foolhardy as a result of drinking tequila and reading Hemingway ran down through the stands ...


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