On the road between Carvoeiro and Lagoa in the Algarve drivers are greeted by a sight that is simultaneously familiar and bewildering. On top of a hill, a pinkish Moorish castle is clearly visible. That is to say, there’s a building whose design and position clearly refers to such a castle. Closer inspection reveals it to be a holiday resort, the Aldeia do Poeta or “poet’s village”.

Shortly after New Year’s Eve this year, hundreds of dead starlings could be seen on the streets in the center of Rome. The birds hit buildings and power lines out of fear of the fireworks, and fell dead from the sky. This particularly happened on the famous Via Cavour, close to Rome’s central station, Termini.

Walter Ulbricht, strongman of the German Democratic Republic between 1949 and 1971, was not a very nice man, by all accounts: a rigid bureaucrat with a relentless survival instinct that cost more than a few comrades dearly. He was responsible for the building of the Berlin Wall, intiated the East German police state, and wasted few tears when dealing with internal troubles. In 1971, he got deposed through a typical Eastern Bloc palace coup and was replaced by another not very nice man, Erich Honecker. Yet despite his questionable resumé, Ulbricht’s reputation today is much better than that of his successor’s. How is that even possible?

Successful forgeries generally have one thing in common: they fulfil a demand. This was also the basis of one of the most famous historical forgeries, and certainly one of the most profitable: the faking of Adolf Hitler’s “diaries” during the early 1980s. When the forgery came to light in 1983, its most astonishing aspect was the breathtaking gullibility on the part of people who more than anyone else should have been trusted to use their critical instincts: journalists. The German magazine Stern took years to overcome the debacle, which it never entirely succeeded in doing.

What do Barack Obama, Admiral Mikós Horthy and the Persian Shah have in common? After today, they’ve all written autobiographies to shed light on their political career. And while Obama’s will be very different in most respects, we can also be sure that in other ways it won’t.

Many of us watched last week’s exciting US presidential elections: on CNN, we saw the screens and numbers move by at breakneck speed. We were reminded that the USA consisted not only of states, but of all kinds of counties, and zoomed literally and figuratively back and forth between those levels. It was a magical and sometimes alienating experience at the same time. But many will also have wondered why we didn’t actually have such a thing in our “country”, in Europe. We don’t really have that much of an idea ​​what is happening in Brussels and we don’t go out on the street angrily or happily and watch TV…