3 October 2013

Who is Nikolaos Michaloliakos?

Yiannis Baboulias

Nikolaos Michaloliakos, the 55-year-old leader of the Golden Dawn, has been remanded in custody pending trial, after a lengthy court hearing last night. He was arrested in the early hours of Saturday morning, accused of leading a criminal organisation. He and 21 others – MPs from the party, members of local branches, police officers who co-operated with the group – may face charges of conspiring to murder, attempted murder, assault and blackmail. The report by the deputy public prosecutor Haralambos Vourliotis describes a group more concerned with making a quick buck and building a pseudo-patriotic front than of ‘citizens concerned with the condition of their homeland in these dark times’.


4 March 2010

How Wonderfully Realistic

Joanna Biggs

‘The book about you is going to be wonderful,’ Nancy Mitford wrote in May 1934 to her sister Unity, who had gone to Nazi Germany to have lunch with Hitler, ‘you are called Eugenia let me know if you would rather not be.’ Wigs on the Green, the only one of Nancy’s novels not to be republished after the war because, as she wrote to Evelyn Waugh, ‘too much has happened for jokes about Nazis to be regarded as anything but the worst of taste,’ is finally reprinted today after 65 years. Until now it was the book that seemed so alluring in footnotes and endnotes: satirical, excoriating, the one that caused Diana to break with Nancy for years.