Ian Thomson

The new age of the refugee

22 July 2017 9:00 am

After years of estrangement in a foreign land, what can immigrants expect to find on their return home? The remembered…

The burning of Savonarola (detail) Getty Images

Mach the Knife

25 March 2017 9:00 am

The business of banking (from the Italian word banco, meaning ‘counter’) was essentially Italian in origin. The Medici bank, founded…

The star-struck Claretta, Mussolini’s last love. According to her diaries, he radiated a ‘god-like potency’ and a ‘bull-like’ magnetism

The Ben and Clara affair

25 February 2017 9:00 am

As a child in fascist Italy, Clara Petacci (known as Claretta) was dutifully adoring of Benito Mussolini and the cult…

The star-struck Claretta, Mussolini’s last love. According to her diaries, he radiated a ‘god-like potency’ and a ‘bull-like’ magnetism

The Ben and Clara affair

23 February 2017 3:00 pm

As a child in fascist Italy, Clara Petacci (known as Claretta) was dutifully adoring of Benito Mussolini and the cult…

Satirising the artful Hoxha

4 February 2017 9:00 am

Blood, they say, is quick on the knife in Albania, where Balkan-style revenge killings, known as giakmarrje (‘blood-takings’), settle ancient…

Satirising the artful Hoxha

2 February 2017 3:00 pm

Blood, they say, is quick on the knife in Albania, where Balkan-style revenge killings, known as giakmarrje (‘blood-takings’), settle ancient…

Blackouts and white coats

26 November 2016 9:00 am

In the cult Steve Martin film The Man With Two Brains, a doctor falls in love with a surgically removed…

The art of getting by

16 July 2016 9:00 am

Naples, ragamuffin capital of the Italian south, is reckoned to be a hive of pickpocketing and black-market manoeuvrings. (A Neapolitan…

Everything comes down to one man’s suffering: Geza Rohrig as Saul

Filming the Final Solution

28 April 2016 1:00 pm

In July 1986, nine months before he died, I met the Italian author and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi at his…

View of the Bay of Naples, 1832

The Grand Tour

19 November 2015 3:00 pm

The Grand Tour usually culminated with Naples, ragamuffin capital of the Italian south, where Vesuvius offered a visual education in…

Cats, whisky and modernity: the J.G. Ballard I knew

8 October 2015 2:00 pm

That cinema is having another Ballardian moment will surprise few fans. J.G. Ballard, who died of cancer in 2009 at…

Transatlantic grandeur: A Cunard liner in 1932

Cruising

1 October 2015 1:00 pm

By the end of my ten-day Atlantic crossing to New York, a new wellbeing seemed to radiate from me. Lulled…

Bookends: A network of kidney-nappers

18 February 2012 11:00 am

Raylan Givens, an ace detective in the Raymond Chandler mould, has encountered just about every shakedown artist and palooka in…

Bookends: Saving JFK

10 December 2011 11:00 am

Stephen King’s latest novel is a time-travel fantasy about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At almost 750 pages, 11.22.63…