Stephen Phelan

I moved to Buenos Aires the weekend before the 30th anniversary of the first day of the Falklands War. I knew enough not to call it that in Argentina, where those islands are known as Las Malvinas. To refer to them by their British name is a political statement if deliberate, and a dead giveaway if accidental.

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AN ex-banker named Guillermo Benitez swings a sawed-off hockey stick in each fist, bringing both of them down on an old computer keyboard like a furious gorilla locked inside a school supply cupboard. His girlfriend Lorena Dominguez is more methodical, lining up empty wine and beer bottles on a metal rack to smash them one by one with an axe handle. The Ramones are playing loud and dumb over the in-house PA system. Through the bunker-like slit of the observation window, it looks and sounds as if these two are having a wonderful time, and this is the entire point of The Break Club.

PAXMAN. The name comes from the Latin, meaning “man of peace”, which does not fit the pugilistic image of its best-known living bearer. Neither did it suit him to discover, as a recent subject of the BBC’s genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are? , that this moniker was contrived by a distant ancestor – a politician called Roger Packsman, who replaced two prosaic Anglo-Saxon letters with that magic “x” to enhance his appeal among the 14th century electorate.

ALMOST 100 years ago, a young apprentice from a Japanese sake company was sent to Scotland to study the art and science of whisky-making. Masataka Taketsuru travelled the highlands and islands and took menial work at various distilleries – learning by getting his hands dirty. He also took a local wife, marrying one Rita Cowan in Campbeltown before returning with her to Japan in 1921.

CHRISTMAS in Uruguay marks the start of the high season. Perhaps this sounds like a giddy little pun on the fact that marijuana is now legal here, but that would not be in the proper spirit. Arriving in Montevideo just as this landmark legislation is being rubber-stamped by the Senate, I quickly learn that foreigners tend to get much more excited about it than most Uruguayans, who kindly request that we please be cool.

IN 2007, the year before he was elected president, Barack Obama told a biographer that his favourite writer was E.L. Doctorow. To my mind, Obama’s political opponents did not make as much of this as they could have. Taken together, Doctorow’s body of work might easily be painted as a fictional analogue to Howard Zinn’s People’s History Of The United States – a liberal-secular rejection of America’s sustaining narrative, a chronicle of the betrayal or disfigurement of the nation’s original promise.

IF you’re going to Lake Baikal, you’re going to Olkhon Island. And if you’re going to Olkhon, you’ll be staying at Nikita’s Homestead. This is the babushka-doll logic of a Trans-Siberian itinerary, especially as the railway passes through Siberia itself. In theory, you are wandering one of the world’s great wide-open spaces. In practice, you are following the same route as every other foreigner aboard the trains here, and probably making all the same stops.

JAMES Salter will turn 88 next month. Nobody could blame the guy for being old-fashioned, although the publication of his new novel All That Is – his first in over 30 years, and presumably his last – has occasioned a certain amount of eye-rolling, to set against the swell of widespread acknowledgement that this great writer’s moment may finally have come. With Updike and Mailer now dead, and Philip Roth recently retired, the lesser-known Salter is the only one of his generation left to fly the flag for post-war American virility.

THERE is a fat, goateed man in a leather jacket standing far too close to a Magellanic penguin. He is giggling nervously – the man, not the penguin – and slowly extending a finger towards the animal’s soft white belly. Surely, I am thinking, he is not actually going to poke this poor bird, which has just swum thousands of miles from the Antarctic to join its colony here at Punta Tombo, a thin, chilly strand of Patagonian desert on the coastal edge of Argentina.