New Song rapidly accumulated a nucleus of talent, and its best-known group was Els Setze Jutges, The Sixteen Judges, whose odd-sounding name came from a phrase used as a password by Catalan patriot troops during the rising against and occupation army in 1640 during the Reapers' War: 'Setze jutges d'un jutjat menjen fetge d'un penjat' ('Sixteen judges on a tribunal eat the liver of a hanged man'). No lisping Castilian, it was believed, could pronounce this barrage of fricatives.

Like most artists who have made an invention of some kind, he tends to overplay the significance of his own and goes on about it as though it were a Rosetta St…

Everything that would be said against the Eixample's heirs, from Le Corbusier's 'ville radieuse' to Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, was already said, with far less …

The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.

The Macedonian language is actually an artifact produced for primarily political reasons.

That is a Nazi expression. The Nazis called Germans who defended Jewish rights self-hating Germans.

Thomas Jefferson, the leading Enlightenment figure in the United States, along with Benjamin Franklin, who took exactly the same view, argued that dependence w…