ignorance about Portugal

Ignorance about Portugal

What do I know about Portugal? Trying to answer that question in advance of a short trip to the Algarve in January, the reply I had to give myself was “very little”. This was to be my first visit to the country, apart from a weekend break in Lisbon some years ago. I chiefly remembered Lisbon as a city where it was possible to walk to most places where a weekend visitor might want to go, so long as one didn’t mind labouring up a lot of very steep hills.

Caminito del Rey (and Cliffs of Moher)

Caminito del Rey (and the Cliffs of Moher)

El Caminito del Rey is a lengthy walkway cantilevered along one side of two sheer gorges near the village of Chorro, northwest of Malaga. It is billed, in some quarters, as the “scariest walk in the world”, but this bit of hyberbole connects to truth only in the way of fairground rides making the same sort of claim. In years past the description had foundation: the original walkway, constructed in the first years of the C20, had, as it approached its centenary, deteriorated so much that it had become lethal. Several walkers fell, and died.

Nerja Museum, Museo de Nerja

Nerja Museum: Some Things I Didn’t Know; Some Things They Didn’t Tell Me

The town of Nerja on Spain’s Costa del Sol has a modern, well thought out museum. It stands fairly inconspicuously in, and partly under, one corner of the vast Plaza de Espana, a forlorn development of mainly empty buildings set round a paved open space that is largely deserted except for fairs at fiesta time.

Artists' personalities: Freud, Lorca, Falla

Artists’ personalities: Thoughts on Freud, Lorca and Falla

One of the most notorious images of the 2016 US Presidential Election campaign is that of Donald Trump looming with menace over the back of Hillary Clinton in a televised debate. It projects a nasty archetype: woman as potential prey to a brutal man.

The Magic Mirror of Brexit

The Magic Mirror of Brexit

Reflecting on the UK’s December 2019 General Election, one thing above all others has been made clear to me. It is how few voters changed their minds about Brexit  in the 3 ½ years since the Referendum, in spite of the impassioned efforts of politicians and activists.

Why is this? Surely, one thought, as the contours of the possible Brexit landscapes became clearer over the months, there would be major reconsiderations (as proponents of a second Referendum argued). After all, as John Maynard Keynes said: “when the facts change, I change my mind”. 

The Predictor of Trumpism: Richard Rorty

The Predictor of Trumpism? Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

The US philosopher Richard Rorty achieved a species of  posthumous and retrospective fame, outside of academic circles, by “prediciting”, in 1998, the advent of Trumpisim. 

In Rorty’s view, the left-wing tradition in the US had swerved away from the dirty-hands business of practical politics, attentive to the political and economic needs of the blue collar classes. What the left had swerved towards was an academic-inspired tendency to “give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice.”

The Thing Itself: Antony Gormley at the Royal Academy

The Thing Itself: Antony Gormley at the Royal  Academy

There’s a drawing in the Antony Gormley exhibition at the Royal Academy that stood apart from plenty of others that did not detain me. It was larger than many; but what arrested my, by then, slightly bewildered gaze was the seeming familiarity of the subject: a shadowy, indistinct figure shuffling (fleeing?) away from the viewer, along a faintly sketched tunnel or crevice. Apart from the contours of the tunnel and the dark figure, the white paper is blank, suggesting a hostile frozen landscape.