Category: Articles

• December 18, 2017

  Some bad journalism on Spain

  [Photo: Cornelia Kraft] [This article was fisrt published at NewsTrust’s News Hunt for Bad Journalism.] In Jennifer Varela’s piece on a recent anti-abortion march in Madrid, the most important words in this article are: “The bussing in of representatives from more than 40 countries…” So, not all of the supposed 1 million people who attended…
• December 10, 2017

  A ray of hope for Europeans

    [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2017.]   Ultra-conservatives will always do what their natures demand. Given any opportunity, they strangle democracy while at the same time claiming that it is democracy that they want to breathe life into. The horrifying repression in Catalonia is an extreme illustration of this…
• November 18, 2017

  Evolution’s forgotten man

   [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2017.] This story begins in the late 18th century with a small boy’s limitless curiosity, at first for staring at his marbles and stones, but soon this grows into a thirst for knowing what lies deep under the British countryside around him.   ​William Smith…
• November 8, 2017

  Dangers of the sell-off

  [This article was was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2017.]   A new year has begun but not much has changed apart from the date on the calendar. In Australia, that faraway land that has the reputation of a kind of paradise according to some people here in Catalonia, the national government is…
• October 18, 2017

  Getting Orwell wrong

   [Photo of  Julian Barnes © Alan Edwards]     [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2017.]   In the New York Review of Books not long ago, the well-known British author Julian Barnes ran his eye over some compilations of George Orwell’s work. Thinking about the school where a young Orwell was sent to…
• September 9, 2017

  Tragedy in Turkey

   [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, September 2017.]   Where to begin when we look at Turkey? Here is a part of the world with so much culture and history in its favour but in the last couple of years it has become somewhere you would not choose to live and you would even…
• July 10, 2017

  The way we are

  [This article was first published in the 10th Anniversary edition of Catalonia Today, June 2014.]    I was a reader of Catalonia Today before I was a writer for Catalonia Today. My first memory of it (at that time published as a weekly newspaper) was being impressed by (now Editor) Marcela Topor’s wonderful interview with…
• July 4, 2017

  Real red: Corbyn and Goytisolo

    [This article was first published under the title "The rallying of the left" in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2017.]   Elections can be strange events. The British one last month produced a mixture of results but one thing it showed was that a genuinely democratic socialist government there is a distinct possibility after the…
• June 10, 2017

  The quiet one

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2017.]       There he is. Sitting along the side of the class, with his head down. He could be a child or an adult — and certainly female too — but today at least this introvert has very little to say for himself.…
• May 19, 2017

  Democracy and other duds

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2017.]   At a time when the European Union appears to be slowly falling apart, its highest court was fixated on whether a woman at one workplace in Belgium should be allowed to wear material covering her head. As a staunch non-believer in religion, I…