Society

There was hardly an election poster to be seen on the roadside during a two-hour drive from London to the country. The British do not appreciate this miracle. In Poland five days before an election, every other fence would be disfigured with photoshopped faces. Our lovely lunch hosts seemed resigned to the coming Red Terror: a purge of the remaining hereditary peers in the House of Lords, a new relationship with the European Union, inheritance taxes. I tried to cheer them up with a piece of Central European wisdom: there is always time for a magnum of champagne between the revolution and the firing squad. I gather that the Minister

Portugal squeezed through to the Euros quarter finals last night after a penalty shoot-out victory against plucky Slovenia. Or perhaps I should say Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal squeezed through, as whatever Roberto Martinez’s team does and however much or little their 39-year-old talisman contributes, the story always seems to be about him. The Beeb used to be fair-minded and respectful, even of the game’s rascals This time it was a tale of two penalties – one missed in normal time and one scored in the shootout. A flood of tears from Ronaldo followed the former and made it seem as if the living legend was having an on-field breakdown – though

With England playing Slovakia in the Euros later today, there’s absolutely no excuse this time for Anglophones to confuse this country with that other European nation of a similar name. That’s because England’s previous opponents in the tournament were indeed Slovenia. This confusion has bedevilled the two countries The confusion between the two nations is common, and emerged after they both became independent states in the early-1990s. Yet for each country, achieving autonomy was one thing; achieving international recognition was quite another. As Michael Palin in his 2007 book New Europe observed upon arriving Slovakia, a few years after its velvet divorce from the Czechs: ‘Its sense of identity can’t have been

Would you like to spend the winter in Benidorm? I guess it depends on the alternatives, but I wasn’t surprised recently to hear of a couple, both in their late-sixties, from Wolverhampton who spend January and February in the Spanish town. They’re not alone; last year over a million Brits chose Benidorm as a holiday destination.   Is success turning into excess? The locals in some tourist hotspots certainly seem to think so It’s not just the Brits and Benidorm; tourism is booming throughout Spain. In 1954, when Spain began promoting package holidays, there were only one million foreign tourists. Last year there were 85 million and the forecast for 2024 is for

If you gaze south from the sarsens of Stonehenge, your view at present is of a constant crocodile of cars and caravans grinding along the nearby A303 en route to the West Country. Unfortunately the government’s plans to improve matters by burying the road in a neat two-mile tunnel, already badly delayed by activist lawfare, now face another obstacle. The problem is that Stonehenge is a Unesco world heritage site – and the UN functionaries that run Unesco do not approve. Indeed they disapprove so much that the Unesco World Heritage Committee last week recommended that unless it was stopped, Stonehenge should be added to its official list of heritage in danger.