Europe between the world wars

 

headlines

Where Poets Are Being Killed and Jailed After a Military Coup

The New York Times

     More than 30 poets have been imprisoned since the military seized power in Myanmar, a country where politics and poetry are intimately connected.

Bipartisan group of senators prepares new infrastructure plan as talks stall

The Washington Post

Floyd family meets Biden as Congress weighs police bill

Miami Herald

Starmer promises race equality act, a year on from George Floyd's murder

The Guardian

     Leader commits a future Labour government to eradicating structural racism in the UK

At long last, Lightfoot offers civilian police oversight plan

Chicago Tribune

__________________________________________

_________________________________________

     The character Liza Minnelli played in the 1972 film, Cabaret, is Sally Bowles.  This literary personality came from The Berlin Stories, written by Christopher Isherwood and published in 1945.

---------------------- [excerpt from The Berlin Stories] --------------------

     "Deeply attached as I am to Amsterdam, I shall always maintain that it has three fatal drawbacks.  In the first place, the stairs are so steep in many of the houses that it requires a professional mountaineer to ascend them without risking heart failure or a broken neck.  Secondly, there are the cyclists.  They positively overrun the town, and appear to make it a point of honour to ride without the faintest consideration for human life.  I had an exceedingly narrow escape only this morning...."

     By the time we had reached Bentheim, Mr. Norris had delivered a lecture on the disadvantages of most of the chief European cities.  I was astonished to find how much he had travelled.  He had suffered from rheumatics in Stockholm and draughts in Kaunas; in Riga he had been bored, in Warsaw treated with extreme discourtesy, in Belgrade he had been unable to obtain his favourite brand of tooth-paste.  

In Rome he had been annoyed by insects, in Madrid by beggars, in Marseilles by taxi-horns.  In Bucharest he had had an exceedingly unpleasant experience with a water-closet.  Constantinople he had found expensive and lacking in taste.  The only two cities of which he greatly approved were Paris and Athens.  Athens particularly.  Athens was his spiritual home.

     By now, the train had stopped.  Pale stout men in blue uniforms strolled up and down the platform with that faintly sinister air of leisure which invests the movements of officials at frontier stations.  They were not unlike prison warders.  It was as if we might none of us be allowed to travel any farther. -------------------------------------------------- [end, Excerpt]

____________________________________

-30-