When the Fiske half of my family immigrated to England, we weren"t exactly popular. We arrived at the coast in boats and disgorged en masse only to be met "with spear tips and sword blades," according to the contemporary account. ...
A year ago, in the wake of yet another American High School massacre"this time by a half-British shooter"I wrote a contentious article on gun control here. I made what seemed to me a reasonable case for increased gun control in the U.S. and ...
In 2004 in rural Berkshire, England, a rush-hour commuter train from London to Plymouth collided with a stationary car at a level crossing and all eight carriages, bearing two hundred people, were derailed. Both the driver of the car, the driver of ...
As the British press draw themselves bloated and bloody-faced from their feeding frenzy on the slaughtered marriage of the "domestic goddess" Nigella Lawson to advertising titan Charles Saatchi, I was struck by how this duel in open court ...
Driving around Spain, one notices all the castles. That’s quite a thing to notice for an Englishman such as myself, as we have thousands of them. But on Spain's freeways they seem to spring up on the horizon with hourly regularity along with ...
In 2009 I first came to Pamplona to run with the bulls. I was terrified in that complete and overwhelming way that total ignorance brings, standing on a street corner and waiting for death to come. I comported myself honorably but not brilliantly ...
My friend Hugh Dancy came to London this week while on a break before filming a series about that least friendly of fictional characters, Thomas Harris’s serial killer Hannibal Lecter. One of Harris's characters calls Lecter “a pure ...
Last week I drove from Seville to Ronda, its great rival for primacy in the bullfighting world. Accompanying me was the noted son of that town, Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez. Cayetano, a former matador, has retired from bullfighting to move onto ...
Last week I gave a talk on my pet topic of bullfighting in front of various politicos from Spain and Britain at the Reform Club in London, which was founded in 1836 in the wake of the Great Reform Act of "32 that was the first step toward ...
Returning to London from Seville I see that abortion is once again one of the top news stories in what the Spanish still refer to as the Anglo-Saxon world: in the US, Ireland, and even Australia. Here in Britain we seem to be much more sanguine ...
Last night while seated in the La Maestranza bullring of Seville to watch the great matador José Marà Manzanares dance with and dispatch six bulls, I was reminded why I became so fascinated by the spectacle we Anglo-Saxons incorrectly call ...
The incident reads like a sick contemporary rewrite of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. A fourteen-year-old girl sat down to eat a meat pie in the kitchen of a friend's house where she was staying. The house was empty at the time except for the family's ...
