Harry´s Blog

There’s an Austrian broadsheet with a right-wing editorial page and a left-wing cultural page. If you’ve lived in Austria long enough, there’s no mystery about that. The Righties will buy the journal for the editorials and the Lefties will buy it for the articles on culture. But that’s not all there is to it. Austrians […]

Henriette von Schirach, née Hoffmann, had a good uncle who had sparkling blue eyes. He’d sit down at the piano in the living room and play Strauss waltzes on the piano. (Apparently, the good uncle overlooked the fact that he was playing music by a composer who was part Jewish.)
Henriette von Schirach, née Hoffmann, had […]

“United Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. Jerusalem was always ours
and will always be ours. It will never again be partitioned and divided….
It was and remains the capital of Israel. Israel never had another capital
and Jerusalem was never the capital of another people.”
- Benjamin Netanyahu, May, 21, 2009
“I have no intention to construct new settlements,
but it makes […]

Churchill and the Imaginary Pig
The Internet is full of articles by Third Reich revisionists in which Churchill is misquoted as saying: “We slaughtered the wrong pig.” That’s revisionist wishful thinking. He could never have said that, since there is no such idiom in English. He would have had to say, “We fought the wrong enemy.” […]

Herbert Kuhner
He could speak Shakespeare’s lines as naturally as if he were actually thinking them.
- Charles Bennett, English playwright
Larry was the greatest of them all - and the most handsome. He was the prince and his princess was Vivien. She wasn’t bad at acting, and she was the most beautiful of them all.
Laurence Olivier directed […]

Dick Cheney on Obama:
“He is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact,
raise the risk to the American people of another attack.”
- New York Times, March 15, 2009
Dick on safety: “I think to the extent that those (Bush-era) policies
were responsible for saving lives,
that the administration is now trying to cancel those policies …
means […]

Manny, Moe and Jack are not the Three Stooges; they’re the Pep Boys. The Pep Boys used their first names after Moe saw a dress shop called Minnie, Maude and Mabel’s, way back in the Twenties. The Pep Boys didn’t have an act. They were the owners of the Pep chain stores for auto parts.
The […]