Expanding the Legacy
Expanding the Legacy
He lapped up life daringly, mastered the art of rebellion, and looked far beyond the horizon to find adventure and clam his restless soul. Just before the implacable woke crowd could ‘cancel’ him, biographer Sue Prideaux snatched Paul Gauguin from its claws. The French postimpressionist painter seemed ripe for the picking: the perfect candidate to be knocked off his pedestal, thrown from his perch, and relegated to the scrapheap of art history. It was not for a lack of trying that the über politically correct posse failed in its pursuit.
To placate its critics, the German government has temporarily reasserted control over the country’s borders. The measure is meant to stem the flow of immigrants entering the country to submit unfounded asylum claims. As of tomorrow, checks will take place on incoming traffic by roving border patrols.
The Republican campaign for the presidency is being shredded by an epic catfight between Trump groupies vying for the love and attention of their idol. Get the popcorn! Also: Kamala Harris Takes Advice from Chinese Sage and American Cheapskates Fail to Pay Up for Defence of Ukraine.
Whichever way US voters decide on election day, it’s the day after that causes most concern. A win by Donald Trump is unlikely to be contested by his opponents but promises to usher in a man who vowed to don the mantle of a dictator on his first day in office. Conversely, it is a foregone conclusion that a loss will be bitterly contested by Mr Trump.
It has all the trappings of a country - a government and parliament, army, courts, elections, passports, and a currency - but it doesn’t feature on any map other than as a terra incognita marked by a speculative broken line. However, this geographic entity has been in existence since 1991, yet the wider world stoically denies its existence. Somaliland seceded from greater Somalia in 1991 after that country’s dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, a major general who seized power in a 1969 coup, responded to local unrest by unleashing his army on the region and dismantling the economic and political power base of the Isaaq clan which had dominated the area since Medieval times.
The showdown between the two contenders for the US presidency produced only winners. Campaign staffers on both sides declared their candidate victorious. To gauge who actually came out ahead, it is telling that mere minutes after both debaters had finished their closing arguments, Democratic campaign leader Jen O’Malley Dillon released a statement saying that Kamala Harris is ready for a second debate next month and asking, rhetorically, if Donald Trump would be up for that. He is believed to mull the question.
At the sharp end of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, student activist Joshua Wong is getting up close and personal with the Chinese powers-that-be who are in no mood to permit or tolerate political dissent. He may be just 21 and baby-faced, but it so happens that Mr Wong is quite headstrong and refuses to give up on his goal - democratic reforms for the former British colony, now a special administrative region of the People’s Republic.
In Mali, she is the grande dame of the country’s exceptionally rich music scene: Khaira Arby - aka The Nightingale of the North. Mrs Arby is celebrated throughout her country and the world. For many of her fans, she also embodies Mali’s irrepressible spirit. Her haunting rendition of traditional Tuareg songs brings tears of joy to audiences as she plucks at the chords of national remembrance with tales of salt mines and camel caravans to the sound of electric guitars and the ngoni, Mali’s traditional lute.
The established wisdom, first formulated and then imposed by the United States, says that trade encourages nations to maintain peace. In the decades following the end of World War II, the US erected a new world order based on the premise that cross border trade creates common interests which conspire...
President Trump may enjoy his Twitter-powered banter and bluster; he is not quite getting his way either at home or abroad. As US relations with the European Union and others sour, President Trump pours out one problem after the other, blaming all and sundry – and particularly the much-maligned EU...
The Paris king of comedy likes to make people wince - either in agony or in shock. His jokes and comments frequently unleash a firestorm on social media where the holier-than-thou brigade rules and expresses its faux-indignation in no uncertain terms. Yassine Belattar, a guy who revels in poking fun at both the establishment and established thought, has received numerous death threats - too many, in fact, to count.
She never had any real chance of winning the Russian presidency and in the end only managed to obtain 1.53% of the vote - at least according to the official tally. Ksenia Sobchak did, however, manage to put issues on the agenda the Kremlin would prefer to ignore. She appeared on state-run national television to denounce the annexation of Crimea as an illegal act. Ms Sobchak also called for the legalisation of soft drugs and expressed strong support for the LGBTQ community - livening up the usually sycophantic news broadcasts.
Should Jeremy Clarkson actually like a car that is not a Volkswagen Golf, most readers would express disbelief. After all, the enfant terrible of automotive journalism is notoriously dismissive of most manufacturers’ effort at progress. Don’t get him started on French cars. The Germans, Mr Clarkson often contends, are very...
So far this year, Europe’s centre ground has held firm – sort of. After Dutch populist Geert Wilders in March failed to significantly expand his following, French voters on Sunday rejected Marine Le Pen in the decisive round of the presidential elections, sending instead former investment banker Emmanuel Macron to...
Moving at a disconcertingly accelerated clip, contemporary reality encroaches on visions of a dystopian world until recently confined to the realm of horror fiction. Featuring newspeak, doublethink, and memory hole – all currently accepted practices – George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, first published in 1949 and never out of print, again shot to the top of bestsellers lists, as did Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) which depicts life in New England – a theocratic dictatorship which takes power, scraps the constitution, and reduces women to mere vessels for breeding.
Mass-market luxury publishing, not necessarily a contradiction in terms, contributes to the resilience of the paper book. In the UK, Penguin Books – the world’s largest publishing house and built on the now perhaps outdated premise that a good book should not cost more than a pack of cigarettes – regularly releases luxury clothbound editions of classic works of literature for as little as £14. With the price of a pack of smokes approaching the ten quid mark, the publisher has stayed remarkable true to its mission.