El Imparcial

For those of you who can read Spanish and are interested in what's going on in Spain and Europe, I suggest you check the new El Imparcial (www.elimparcial.es) piloted and steered by my good friend Luis María Anson, a true believer in freedom and impartiality. Let us all welcome this new line of thought which, I am sure, will help present the news in a better light than at present.
Congratulations Luis Maria Anson and José Varela Ortega.

The Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations

This is NOT a book review, just random comments on The Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (secoind Edition). I chanced upon it on the Internet and checked a few writers, Spanish mostly. Cervantes was first: only one hit, "Hunger is the best sauce in the world", which happens to be a proverb and long in existence before Cervantes was born. And I ask myself: Of all Cervantes wrote -and he wrote a lot- is this the best quotation the compiler could get? No further comment.
Then I turned to Ortega y Gasset (He wrote The Revolt of the Masses, remember?) and got again only one hit: "Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo." And the sorry translation offered is -get a load of this!-: "I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter I do not preserve myself." There!
In view of this, I turned to other Spanish-speaking writers and thinkers, some of them Nobel Prize winners: Baroja, Aleixandre, García Márquez, Benavente, Azorín, Jiménez, Calderón, Lope de Vega, Galdós, Neruda, Octavio Paz, Gabriela Mistral... who are not included. But, of course, I find Groucho Marx, no less, who provides quotations from his film Duck soup without crediting the scriptwriters, the ones responsible for the funny gags and turns of phrase. Also, and per usual, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Bernard Shaw are included.
To the average British mind Spanish-speaking writers and thinkers are of little account. Salvador de Madariaga -he taught at Oxford, and wrote in English also- is a garlic-smelling spick who should be kept off an English Dictionary of quotations. For the British Groucho Marx carries more intellectual weight, by all means.
Stereotypes die hard.

Bertrand Russell and poor me

Bertrand Russell wrote about how we all needed "some human warmth to keep away the chill of the Universe" but that we find more often than not, as he said, "the treachery of friends, the discovery of the cruelty that lurks in average human nature..." and we realize how alone we really are when the chips are down, when we must rely on the strength of our character to keep away the hurt, the pain and confront, somehow, "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" We franticaly try to plug up the holes of our inadequacies with futile make-do activities... but time slips through our fingers, and our convictions shudder...
Forgive me for this flight into my emotions. It will pass... I hope.