Well, I knew I wouldn't be able to stay away from blogging for a whole twelve days. It hasn't been quite as hard as I expected, though, because the weather has been fantastic, the view from our house across the sea is glorious (pix to follow when I get home) and the cybercafe down the hill in Ventimiglia only has four PCs and a huddle of people waiting to use them.
I'm not hanging around long today. All I want to say is, check out Daniel Finkelstein's column on Tony Blair's Congressional Gold Medal. As Stephen Pollard says, it's a must-read.
Also, Martha Bayles - the last interviewee in my Transatlantic Voices series - wrote a long and thoughtful article on America's international image in last Sunday's Washington Post. It revisits some of the arguments she set out in her recent Wilson Quarterly essay, so if you missed that, now's your chance to catch up. Some of the commenters to this blog didn't take kindly to her views on American pop culture, but even if you don't agree with everything she says, she's definitely sharper than just about every media critic around.