Paul Wood

Paul Wood

Paul Wood read History and Law at Queens' College, Cambridge. He fell in love with Romania when he first visited in 1990 and has lived there since 1998. He owns an executive search company called Apple Search and is writing a book about Romania. His favourite activities are talking, thinking, walking, reading, travelling and looking round churches.

Too Many Questions

Let’s keep out of war in Syria. The BBC 5 o’clock news started with the most extraordinary and chilling words I have heard in fifty years of watching or listening to the BBC News. “Russia and America edge closer to war over Syria.” Previously the most chilling words I had heard ...

Westminster, London

Attacked Again

This past Tuesday several people were murdered just outside the House of Commons. Killing people outside security barriers makes much better sense for a terrorist than trying to pass them, though the murderer did that too in the end, before being shot dead. Tim Stanley, the British journalist and ...

Fear of Conversation

A few days ago, I met a mordant Palestinian-American who told me why he refuses to recognize the existence of Israel. He said that in 1948 his father, as a boy of 6, was tied to a tree by Jewish soldiers and forced to witness the murder of several uncles and cousins. His father was spared because ...

The Cologne Cover-up

I hope the Cologne mass sexual assaults will be of lasting and huge significance to European history, and I even think they might. (Recently arrived Arab migrants sexually assaulted large numbers of German women in front of the Cologne Cathedral on New Year's Eve, in case you have been in a ...

Seeking Refuge From Mass Migration

My Syrian Christian friends"€”refugees themselves in Bucharest, though affluent refugees"€”are strongly opposed to admitting Muslim asylum seekers into Europe. They have reasons. Quite by chance, one just called me, on business. He is an intelligent man of good family. (Christians make up ...

Sucevita Monastery

Romanian Holiday

Rains finally came. The dog days came to a pause for two days, but Bucharest was still hot. We drove to Tulcea"€”the quiet of a small town in a poor province on a summer afternoon"€”and took the speedboat to Chilia, which gives its name to one of the three branches of the Danube Delta. The ...

First They Came for the Bakers

All countries are traditions based on religion and genetics, though in irreligious countries they don’t know it. And all European countries these days seem to be in very big trouble. The Republic of Ireland, where until the 1990s divorce was illegal, is about to vote on whether to institute ...

Refuge from the Refugees

A woman friend once told me that the secret of being a bitch is to tell the truth in the nastiest possible way. In Fleet Street a succession of women journalists have been paid to be complete bitches, because male and especially female readers enjoy it. It’s probably a mildly sado-masochistic ...


Columnists

Sign Up to Receive Our Latest Updates!