The Sophists have a bad reputation. Those itinerant teachers were skeptics and relativists, they charged for their lessons and sought to persuade, through one argument or the other, instead of seeking absolute truth, in which they did not believe. Plato and Aristotle despised them.

The wars in the Middle East never end: they morph into new conflicts. Every time the United States, Israel, or any Arab country launches a military campaign, instigates a coup, or finances a guerrilla movement supposedly aligned with its interests, it plants the seeds of a future crisis.

Human societies have always questioned the nature of power and its effect on those who wield it. Right now, many are wondering why Donald Trump, however idiotic he may be—and we know he is—has embarked on the adventure of a disastrous war. There are countless partial explanations: pressure from Israel, family business interests… But, as always, it is illuminating to read the classics. In this case, Suetonius and his De vita Caesarum: Lives of the Twelve CaesarsGaius Suetonius Tranquillus (69-126) was head of libraries and archives under Emperor Trajan and personal secretary to his successor, Emperor Hadrian. This gave him access to all private and public documents in Rome. Lives of the Twelve CaesarsFrom Julius Caesar to Domitian, this is a hilarious and seemingly frivolous book, given the profusion of anecdotes and the meticulous detail with which it describes the sexual habits of its protagonists. In fact, well into the 20th century, most translations omitted or masked certain passages. For example, Tiberius's "little fish." These weren't "little fish," but rather children who had to remain underwater while they sucked his genitals. In any case, Suetonius had firsthand information. And he had personally met several of the emperors he portrayed.

Robert Fisk (1946-2020) was, for three decades, the most influential, well-informed, and criticized foreign correspondent in the Middle East. He covered every war in a region perpetually at war. In 2005 he published The great war for civilizationThese voluminous memoirs (1,511 pages in the Spanish edition) contained, in their penultimate paragraph, a melancholic phrase: "In the Middle East, people relive their past history over and over again, every day."

Gorton and Denton is an electoral district in Greater Manchester. Where there were once mines and textile industries, there is now poverty. Elections were held in Gorton and Denton on Thursday, and the seat went to the Greens, followed by the far-right Reform Party, and in third place, Labour. The Conservatives didn't even show up. The result demonstrates how the political map of the United Kingdom is changing. But there's something even more interesting: the Greens won thanks to the Muslim vote.

Jaime Gil de Biedma exaggerated: "Of all the stories in History, the saddest is that of Spain, because it ends badly." Perhaps the poet didn't know Haiti, whose history began badly, continued worse, and continues to sink into endless horror. Haiti is hardly mentioned anymore: why continue describing the chaos and violence of each day?

We live in turbulent times, if you'll pardon the obvious. A new empire, China, threatens the hegemony of another, the United States. New technologies like artificial intelligence propel us into the unknown. Mass migrations alter societies' self-perception. The basest popular passions (racism, xenophobia, classism) are unleashed, the middle class is sinking, and truth and lies are becoming blurred. And not even the most robust democratic mechanisms seem capable of surviving the chaos.

I am an atheist. And, while remaining so, I now find myself on the side of the Christians. Our enemy is strong: it relies, perhaps without much awareness of it, on paganism, on nature itself, and on the philosophy that followed Friedrich Nietzsche. Perhaps those of us on the Christian side don't even know we are Christians. I'm not talking, of course, about religion, but about a clash between worldviews that erupted in the 20th century and is characterizing the 21st.

The Catalan phrase "to call for bad times"It refers to the doomsayer or the jinx: the one who predicts misfortunes. In Spain, and in Catalonia, it is usually the one who does the opposite who attracts misfortune. That is, "calls good weather." In other words, they see the sky as bright and clear without knowing (or knowing, even worse) that storm clouds are approaching.

DomainTom Holland's book is probably the best history of Christianity published to date. Aside from revealing the immense global influence of Christian cultural values, beyond the religious sphere, the reader may reach the last page with the feeling that there is nothing new under the sun. If we limit ourselves to the realm of the Catholic, or universal, Church, it is evident that it has never ceased to revolve around two fundamental issues: poverty and purity. Now, as the world plunges into a dizzying crisis, both issues are highly topical. And they demand clear positions. The question of priestly purity or impurity has resurfaced in recent decades, with the continuous denunciations of abuse and rape by members of the clergy. And the Doctors of the Church have continued to refer to an idea formulated in the fourth century to oppose the Donatists.

German national identity (assuming such a thing exists) changed after Nazism. The same happened with the Jews, recipients of a wave of international sympathy after the horror of the Holocaust. Now, with the atrocities Israel is committing in Gaza and the West Bank, the perception of Jewish identity (not just Israeli) is shifting worldwide. What hardly changes is how we see the Palestinians: either terrorists or victims, almost never human beings in all their dimensions.

These days, it's common to hear that the imperialist excesses of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin hark back to the 19th century. But, imperial issues aside, there are other, perhaps deeper, similarities with that century. The first half of the 21st century, like the first half of the 19th, is an era of romanticism and fear, of technological advances and social crises, of distrust in parliamentary systems and unbridled capitalism.

It sounds a bit strange to speak of the "Catalan soul," or the "Spanish soul," or the "Swedish soul." And yet, it's taken for granted that a "Russian soul" exists, that "dark place" spoken of by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, and almost all the other writers of the golden age of Russian literature. Vladimir Putin also frequently appeals to the "Russian soul," in opposition to the supposed soullessness of Western Europe.

Perhaps these dates, so prone to overeating and heavy digestion, aren't the most appropriate to talk about this. But it has to be done sometime. I'm referring to good food and the few people who taught us to appreciate it. In a country that had suffered much hunger, and where frequenting restaurants was a privilege, the word began to gain popularity half a century ago. gastronomy to define a matter about which we knew nothing.

Bad people are all very similar. Good people, on the other hand, are each good in their own way. Years ago, I met two friends who practiced kindness as an ethical imperative and as a desire for understanding. Both were Christians, both were short, and both sometimes smoked those terrifying twisted cigars called Tuscans, but that's where the similarities ended. One was the journalist Josep Martí Gómez, who died in 2022. The other was the priest (and journalist) Josep Bigordà, who died this week at the age of 97. Meeting people like that brightens life a little. When I started working in The Catalan PostBy 1977, Martí and Bigordà were already prestigious figures. Martí Gómez had gained fame as an interviewer, alongside Josep Ramoneda, in the pages of Pleaseand wrote legal chronicles that extracted diamonds of humanity and beauty from every personal misery. In 1968, Bigordà had hosted the founding assembly of the Catalan Workers' Commissions in his modest parish of Sant Medir.

Some books stand the test of time remarkably well. False dawnJohn Gray's book offers a good example. It was published in 1998, before the euro, before Vladimir Putin, before social media, but its diagnosis of the effects of the "free market" (a concept invented in the mid-19th century) and its logical evolution, "global capitalism," remains accurate: social disintegration, the impotence of politics, and a brutal rise in inequality.

What goes on behind the Kremlin walls? This was the question that, during the long existence of the Soviet Union (1917-1991), certain figures known as the Kremlin strove daily to answer. KremlinologistsThey supposedly knew everything there was to know about a secretive and complex regime. When the time came, it became clear that they knew almost nothing: the collapse of the Soviet Union caught them completely by surprise. Kremlinologist Europe's most celebrated woman, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, was a perfect example of that group blinded by its own prejudices.

Florenci Pujol i Brugat was an interesting character. He made most of his considerable fortune by trafficking in the scarcest commodity in an autarkic dictatorship: the foreign currency that allowed the Catalan textile industry to import and export. Now, 45 years after his death in 1980, he is at the center of a trial against his son Jordi and seven of his grandchildren. It is curious that Pau Ferrer, the lawyer for four of the former president's children (Marta, Mireia, Pere, and Oleguer), presented the book as evidence for the defense in the first session of the trial. Banca Catalana. More than a bank, more than a crisisThat book was written by Siscu Baiges, Jaume Reixach, and myself after a long and unpleasant investigation: Jordi Pujol's bankrupt bank was a taboo subject, and no one wanted to speak openly about it. Pressure and threats abounded, both before and after publication. The book marked the lives of the three of us in one way or another.

Sometimes it seems as if the European Union, along with a few other countries on other continents, lives in a world of yesterday: everything around it is changing very rapidly. The paradox is that the change is actually directed toward the day before yesterday, toward a distant past from which we thought we had emancipated ourselves. Perhaps all this is happening because, with some justification, we fear the future.

Readers of historical fiction tend to think that, besides being entertained, they learn something. Perhaps they do, depending on the quality of the work. Something can be learned. At least about the context in which the fiction unfolds. A great Portuguese novel, "Revolution," by Hugo Gonçalves, recently published by Libros del Asteroide, transports us to a moment in history not so long ago (I remember it very well) that, nevertheless, seems very distant: the so-called Ongoing Revolutionary Process (1974-1975). That is to say, those tumultuous 19 months in which Portugal was on the verge of adopting a Soviet system and teetered on the brink of civil war. Memory is a curious thing. The overthrow of the interminable Portuguese dictatorship of the Estado Novo (1926-1973) by the Army is known as "the Carnation Revolution": a happy, swift event, with very few casualties. But, except for the euphoric initial days, there was neither happiness nor speed. There was violence, and vertigo during the uncertain "revolutionary process underway": "underway" meant that no one had any certainty about where these astonishing events would lead.