Recently I found myself idling away an afternoon in Angelina Jolie’s Winnebago. Angelina and I were discussing books. More specifically, she was talking me through her taste in erotic fiction, which spans the centuries from the Marquis de Sade to ‘more modern stuff’. ‘Sometimes,’ she remarked, ‘you find a passage that works for you and
If you listen carefully, you can hear the drums of revolution beating once more in Washington. The neoconservatives have found another regime that needs changing, another enemy of ‘freedom’, and they are setting about putting matters right in their usual way. This time the target is Belarus, a small country in between Poland, Ukraine and
A peculiar arrangement prevailed in 8th-century France, during the final decades of the Merovingian dynasty. The power of the kings, once savage and formidable, had subsided and then collapsed. They continued to enjoy the title of monarch, but the real power was exercised by officers of the royal household, the so-called ‘mayors of the palace’.
