Apart from following in Roger Scruton's hoofprints by learning to ride late in life, James Dellingpole's main claim to British intellectual fame is " Watermelons " a reductionist history of climate science expanded into book form from the haiku-length observation that true blue subscribers to the Guardian's obsessive view of climate as crisis often appear green on the outside & red on the inside, a cliche' coined in a Telegraph column about 1/2 ºF of human climate forcing ago.
No Nuts
Holly Case writes that Austrian politics is still sometimes compared to the ‘rum-soaked sponge filled with nougat and jam called Punschkrapferl: brown on the inside with a thin pink glaze’ (LRB, 20 November). It seems anachronistic to apply the metaphor to the Red Vienna of the early 1920s, before the Brownshirts were established; the image probably surfaced in the 1970s. Today, the Punschkrapferlkoalition refers predominantly, and confusingly, to the coalition of social democrats (SPÖ, red) and liberals (NEOS, pink) that governs Vienna. Most important, though, is the mention of nougat. In English the word refers to a chewy or crunchy sweet stuff that may or may not contain nuts, but in German it refers to a confection made from hazelnuts or almonds. Punschkrapferl, however, are nut-free and soft, made of Biskuitteig, ‘sponge cake material’.
Victoria Wang
Edinburgh
