Eurofile

Mind-boggling palindromes and decidedly odd tongue twisters Tongue Twisters From the well-known line ‘around the rugged rock, the ragged rascal ran’ to the awkward phrase ‘red leather, yellow leather’ one aspect of mastering a language is being able to master its tongue twisters. And they are always decidedly odd sentences: Combien de sous sont ces […]

Russian film Loveless landed with a wallop, representing the first serious contender for this year’s Palme d’Or. It’s a weighty, heavy, compellingly grim look at modern Russia and confirms its director Andrey Zvyagintsev as one of the top film makers around, even if Putin might not see it that way. Like his recent Cannes entry […]

Cannes celebrated the opening of the 70th edition of its film festival with a knotty, indulgent film about a knotted, indulgent film maker Marion Cotillard in Ismael’s Ghosts – Credit: Archant Here on the Croisette, at least, they know their audience. Ismael’s Ghosts, by Arnaud Desplechin, premiered at Cannes before wider release across France, its […]

By now, everyone has heard of Hygge, right? These 60 European words with no English equivalent will excite wordsmiths and fans of unusual phrases Poronkusema (Finnish) The distance equal to how far a reindeer can travel without a comfort break (about 5 kilometres) (literally, reindeer’s piss) Campanilismo (Italian) Local pride, attachment to the vicinity (literally, […]

Forget Harry Potter mania – fan fever for Goethe’s tragic hero Werther was blamed for copycat tragedies and popularising yellow trousers This time 243 years ago, in an attic room at his family home in Frankfurt, 23-year-old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was sitting at a high desk scribbling away frantically in a sustained fit of […]

The English might claim their language is clear and straightforward, and mock the complexities of others. But when it comes to opacity, it is English which leads the way A German word recently made it into our news. The word was Bundespräsidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung. It was deemed to be newsworthy because of its extreme length, fifty-one letters. […]

A look ahead to what will be a big – possibly the biggest yet – year for books from and around the continent When you think about European literature a couple of things might come to mind. Sprawling Russian epics the size of house bricks, maybe, whose list of aristocratic characters alone could fill a […]

The unfailing brilliance of some of Europe’s greatest ever exports: cinematic villains, and villainesses Jeremy Irons in Die Hard With A Vengeance (1995) – Credit: Cover Images I blame Alan Rickman. The late British actor practically trademarked the sneering villain role back in the 1980s, first as Hans Gruber in Die Hard, then as the […]

Bernard Sumner recounts his cultural European journey, from the early days of Joy Division to New Order's latest album

In the mid-nineties I was living in Penge, south London, and I was on the dole. A pretty harsh double whammy in anyone’s book. I’d spend my days laying on the sofa feeling sorry for myself, finding my swooning self-pity resonating at regular intervals with a particular sound that drifted in from outside; a mournful, […]