To the National Theatre for David Hare’s one-man show on Berlin. I wasn’t at all sure what to expect, but I didn’t expect this. Quite simply, it was embarrassingly, exasperatingly awful. Hare, in person, is a fan of the southern English amateur/eccentric shtick. He makes much play ...

Well, will you look at this? Remember Tory MEP Syed Kamall, who was the author of a proposal to implement total Internet surveillance in the EU, in order to make the French record industry happy? (I’m sorry to say I spelt his name wrong.) We beat that one. But now look at him - here’s a ...

A sad and undignified tale from LeWeb3; it’s chilly and the conference WLAN doesn’t work, so a whole gaggle of US microsleb gadgetbloggers staged a queeny flounce. And, of course, it’s all more evidence of the eventual demise of Europe. Isn’t it always? Not so long ago, we we...

The bell, Olympiastadion, Berlin An artefact is an ideology made manifest. The bell in this picture is the one made for the Reichssportfeld in Berlin, installed in the bell tower you can see behind it, brought crashing down when the damaged tower was demolished shortly after the second world war, re...

An interesting post at Language Log, about the position of minority languages/dialects in France. Traditionally, France before the Revolution was more of a geographical expression than a state in the modern sense, to adapt the famous phrase about pre-Bismarckian Germany. Highly diverse regions, with...

That gaggle of elite geeks who have been arguing against the horrible possibilities an internetworked world offers to fraudsters and state bullies for years have often said that one day, there’ll be a horrible crunch. A disastrous moment of truth. As Chernobyl finished the reputation of nuclea...

The German newspaper whose website could be better organised has a very good article about the Gurtel, Vienna’s other great boulevard, once described as the proletarian Ringstrasse. I never knew this, though: Wobei auf dem Gürtel früher Linksverkehr herrschte, wie in England. Siegfried Tschm...

Stupider than you can imagine. Evidence, the map over at this fine post from Sadly, No!. Read the whole thing, but as well as introducing the best title for a blog post ever, they’ve caught “Gates Of Vienna” pretending that in the future, Europe will be divided into Islamic states ...

Jason Burke of the Observer reports that the next few days are expected to bring the indictment of people involved in Ergenekon. Ergenekon? Well, if you read AFOE you’ll already know that Ergenekon is a secret extreme-right network of influence within the Turkish elite, suspected of being behi...

Hungarian intellectuals are protesting against the owner of the newspaper Magyar Hirlap, after the paper started printing some genuinely shocking anti-semitic opinions. Specifically, its new columnist Zsolt Bayer took it on himself to describe “the Budapest Jewish journalists” as “...