An almost imaginary Caribbean kingdom is rocked by a succession dispute. Concretely, Redonda is a desert rock located about fifty kilometers from the island of Antigua. It is made up of an extinct volcano, bordered by steep cliffs and occupied by a herd of goats, a colony of owls and a species of seabird called the “red-footed booby”. It is 1.6 kilometers long and just over 500 meters wide and technically belongs to the state of Antigua and Barbuda.
In a parallel and literary universe, however, it presents an infinitely more glamorous face: that of an island nation whose history dates back to Christopher Columbus and whose line of rulers, to say the least disputed, includes some of the most renowned writers of the last century.
His most recent “monarch” His name was Javier Marías, a genius as eccentric as he was learned, inhabited by a keen sense of the absurd, and whom many people consider to be the greatest Spanish novelist of contemporary times. Reigning as “Xavier Iis de Redonda”, he had fully embraced his fantasized royal duties, and died [le 11] last September without leaving an heir.
A crown of gold and wood
The confusion caused by his disappearance threatens to put an end to a royal epic dating back to the XIXe century.
The official history of Redonda begins in 1493, when Christopher Columbus, sailing off the island, decided not to stop on this insignificant rock. It was not until 1865 that Matthew Dowdy Shiell, a merchant from the neighboring island of Montserrat, asked Queen Victoria to grant the title of king to her only son and heir. According to the legend – which is not always easy to distinguish from fiction in the history of this kingdom – bishops of the Caribbean then placed a crown of gold and wood on the head of the 15-year-old boy .
The game
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The Sunday Times (London)Founded in 1822, it merged with The Times in 1967. The darling of Rupert Murdoch is today one of the best quality Sunday newspapers, in any case the most widely read.
Like the Sunday editions of major British dailies, The Sunday Times is composed of many supplements: Company, Home, Money, Review. Less focused on hot news than its daily version, it gives a lot of space to in-depth investigations and lighter articles.
As The Times, this weekly installed its online edition in January 1996. Their websites are built on the same model, allowing the visitor to navigate from one to the other without getting lost. However, the site is not very accessible to non-subscribers, especially since the articles available for free are not indicated. The presentation remains sober, even sad. The selected articles often refer to other articles on the same themes, thus facilitating reading and research.
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