The Galician President, Mr Fraga, said on Friday that no-one could be more supportive of equality for women than him. In fairness, one would have to say this must be true as his daughter was a minister in the last government. Doubtless on merit.

Mr Fraga returned to the subject of women yesterday, when someone asked him why he thought there were so many Don’t Knows in the opinion polls. ‘Well’, he said, ‘People don’t always tell the truth. Like, for example, when you ask a woman how many men she’s slept with’. Needless to say, his response to the storm of criticism this provoked was that he’d been quoted out of context. I say ‘storm’ but, in truth, it was a very small one, the feminist movement being virtually non-existent in Spain.

Quote of the Day

Beethoven inaugurated a barbaric U-turn away from other-directed music to an inward-directed, narcissistic focus on the composer himself and his own tortured soul. This ghastly inversion led slowly but inevitably to the awful atonal music of Schönberg and Webern

Dylan Evans, senior lecturer in intelligent autonomous systems at the University of the West of England. And a man who should be very grateful he doesn’t have to listen to the Spanish Classical Music channel of an evening.