Quotes from John Richardson

Sri Lanka long has been described as a paradise by travellers.

While the Sinhalese are a majority on their island, they are, as historian Kingsley M.de Silva has noted, a majority with a minority complex.

Sri Lanka's problems were caused by too much democracy.

Until the 1930s, a heavy belt of forests north of ancient capital, Anuradhapura, formed a natural barrier between the Sinhalese and Tamil peoples.

The history of post-independence Sri Lanka, from a Sri Lankan Tamil perspective, is a history of lost privileges, intensifying discrimination, failure of democratic institutions to protect their rights and finally,coercion by an overwhelmingly Sinhalese security establishment.

For years, Sri Lanka was viewed as a model developing nations. It gained independence peacefully and sustained one of the feew authentically competitive democratic systems in the Global south.

Many younger elite Sri Lankans,especially young Tamils, have capitalised on foreign university credentials and their parents' dwindling wealth to escape from the daily stress and tragedy of life on the island.

Sri Lanka's problems were caused by declining even-handedness and transparency of its democratic processes and institutions.

Erik Satie died on July 1, 1925; his last words were 'Ah, the cows...

Designer Elsa Schiaparelli's enormously popular perfume, Shocking, launched in 1937, was one of countless products to derive inspiration from surrealism, revealing how rapidly a movement that was rooted in radical Marxist and Freudian principles could degenerate, so far as its founders were concerned, into an eye-catching, mind-blowing gimmick of immense use to advertisers, fashion photographers, and moviemakers. Breton would be horrified by this development; Dalí delighted.