Uncommon Decency

“Soon there will only be five kings left: the king of spades, of clubs, of hearts, of diamonds, and the king of England”. King Farouk of Egypt was off in his prediction, but the permanency of the British monarchy has recently come under heightened...

In the mid-1990s, the mayor of Istanbul was quoted saying: “democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off”. That mayor is now president and his critics fear he believes Turkey has reached its...

It's debate season on Uncommon Decency. This week we evaluated President Macron's visit to China, and the premiership of Giorgia Meloni. As well as what stood out to us from the first part of this year. Enjoy! As always, please rate and review...

“If only mine were the last drop of Spanish blood to be spilled in civil strife. God willing, may the Spanish people at peace, so replete with extraordinary virtue, at last find homeland, bread and justice”. Who among today’s Spaniards could...

“I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace”. We begin with this quote from Stefan Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday (1942)...

"Is it a revolt? No sire, it's a revolution". While this famous exchange is attributed to Louis the XVIth and the Duke de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, odds are that French President Macron has had similar conversations with his aides in the past few...

While the geographic center of the EU is apparently in a small Bavarian field, its political center is harder to pin down. Historically, it was probably somewhere between France and Germany, but with the war in Ukraine, this center has seemingly moved...

On episode five of this show, the late Gyórgy Schópflin, then retired and in the twilight of his life, made a lucid observation about what, at bottom, set his native Hungary apart from his adoptive Great Britain. “Hungary has no post-colonial...

"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead...

Since mid-December, a corruption scandal has been unfolding in Brussels that could soon begin rock the European Union's (EU) very foundations. Eva Kaili, a 44-year-old Member of the European Parliament (MEP), was detained by Belgian authorities...