Towards the end of Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine Part Two, our marauding anti-hero burns a copy of the Quran, along with other Islamic books, as a kind of audacious test. “Now, Mahomet,” he cries, “if thou have any power, come …
An Arctic war is coming
In a land of extremes, nowhere in the Arctic does the temperature oscillate more wildly than the tiny settlement of Fort Yukon in north-eastern Alaska. This village — of a few hundred residents belonging to the indigenous Gwich’in community, and …
Why Faroe Islanders kill whales
Three bottlenose whales have come to Kaldbaksfjorður. They can be easily seen from the winding road that skirts the edge of the narrow sound, ten minutes’ drive from Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands. Two are adults, twice the …
Do Geordies want to be Vikings?
Geordies, it is said, “have long wished to be Vikings”. So some among us might have looked north with envy last week. It’s not often that Orcadian irredentists make international headlines, but the suggestion that the Orkneys might be reunited …
The case for Orkney nationalism
When John Maynard Keynes visited Orkney for two months in the summer of 1908, he wrote, enchanted, to a friend from Stromness, claiming “the view from this town is the Bay of Naples and the Island of Capri”.
This stunningly …
German conscription doesn’t make sense
During his time as a conscript in a West German artillery unit, my father recalls having to clean the barracks toilet with a toothbrush. This was the early Sixties; he had just graduated from a Gymnasium, the equivalent of grammar …
The spectre of terror returns to Scandinavia
It wasn’t the first time Rasmus Paludan had set fire to the Quran. The leader of “Hard Line”, the far-Right Danish party, he was temporarily banned from entering Sweden in 2020 because he was planning to commit his habitual stunt …
Denmark is a Right-wing paradise
The Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier probes the darkest depths of modern society, often with a deranged, comical touch. When I moved to Denmark a year and a half ago, it was reassuring for me that Lars was there, lurking …