A Romanian immigrant named Ion Purice, married to an Italian woman and with a young child, works as a long-distance trucker for a company in Rovigo, Italy. A day or two ago, as he was taking a load of foodstuffs (I think) to Holland, he saw a terrible road accident: just ahead of him, a Moroccan father and little daughter were in a car that smashed ( Read more... )

Today was one of those days where most of my time was spent on buses, travelling from place to place and from errand to errand. At one stop, a couple came on. The man was a burly, shaven-headed archetypical working class Londoner, aging, but clearly still vigorous, the kind you imagine working in some house that was being renewed, or drinking beers ( Read more... )

Probably the most important learning experience in my life took place when I was about eighteen. One part of it was a comics masterpiece, published just as I was falling back in love with comics. Chris Claremont, a man who has never since written anything remotely as good, indeed who has rarely written anything good at all, wrote one of the ( Read more... )

Go here to read a story of incredible and totally true heroism.

What was the most glorious moment in the history of England? Most of us, of course, would single out the awe-inspiring defiance of the summer of 1940, when, left with no allies and uncomfortably few weapons, the United Kingdom had to face an apparently invincible enemy coalition across three continents - and peace feelers from Germany were met with ( Read more... )

...AS FAMOUS AS THOSE OF WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN? WHY ARE THERE NO MONUMENTS TO HER IN THE CENTRE OF AMERICAN CITIES? WHY DOES SHE NOT HAVE A DAY DEDICATED TO HER??I am an opponent of "positive discrimination"; and while I love the study of history in all its forms, I detest the motives why black history or women's history is pushed on us. But in ( Read more... )

What follows is a special column written for The Paris News in Paris, Texas (theparisnews.com) that was widely forwarded by e-mail. It's written by former Paris News sports writer Greg Thompson, now director of corporate communications for Chick-fil-A ( Read more... )

Two quite different but wholly admirable people left us yesterday. Yelena Bonner, the loyal and heroic wife of the hero of freedom Andrei Sakharov, has died; and Clarence Clemons, the unforgettable sax player of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, did not survive the after-effects of a stroke ( Read more... )

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Sometimes I forget just how life-giving music is - music in general, all good music, but Beethoven in particular. I was having a dreary, tiring time, and this wonderful piece just shot through me like new blood. I think that if giving people joy, energy, endurance, is good, then for that good alone Beethoven must be counted among the saints.

...these are the only pictures of Debbie I have. I drew them from memory a couple of years after she dropped out from my sight, when I had decided to write a superhero story featuring her.

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