Albania has long lived in Italy’s shadow
Albanians are descended from the most ancient of European peoples, the Illyrians. The country came into existence only after 1912…
Starving street urchins sell their sisters in the chaos of Naples, 1944
When the Allies arrived in the city in the wake of the German retreat, they were shocked by the child prostitutes, shady commerce and downright miseria
The deep sorrow of losing a sibling
My sister died last summer, before her time, at 58. Her death has left me shaken with sorrow and remorse:…
A celebration of the music of Jamaica
Abandoned in infancy, Alex Wheatle grew up in children’s homes, but found salvation in roots reggae – and, eventually, his father in Jamaica
Henri Christophe, King of Haiti, was not such a ridiculous figure
He certainly had delusions of grandeur, but his ambition to educate a people newly emerged from slavery showed a true visionary spirit
Violence and beauty combine in Siena
Siena, the jewel of Tuscan cities, was the mercantile and banking centre of medieval Europe. Bankers in Pre-Renaissance Siena preened…
The invisible man: The Glass Pearls, by Emeric Pressburger, reviewed
Not all Germans were swayed by Hitler, but the majority were. Karl Braun, the fugitive Nazi doctor at the heart…
Naples will never escape the shadow of Vesuvius
Naples, the tatterdemalion capital of the Italian south, is said to be awash with heroin. Chinese-run morphine refineries on its…
Celebrating Konstantin Paustovsky — hailed as ‘the Russian Proust’
When is a life worth telling? The Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky’s six-volume autobiography The Story of a Life combines high…
Dark days in the Balkans: life under Enver Hoxha and beyond
For many in the West, Albania remains as remote and shadowy as the fictional Syldavia of the Tintin comics. The…
Darkness, desolation and disarray in Germany
In Geoffrey Household’s adrenalin-quickening 1939 thriller Rogue Male, a lone English adventurer takes a potshot at Hitler and then runs…
It takes a trained ear fully to appreciate Indian music
At George Harrison’s 1971 concert for Bangladesh, awkwardly, the audience applauded after Ravi Shankar and his musicians had paused to…
My fight to stop the Chinese censors sanitising Dante
How Dante fell foul of the Chinese Communist party
CIA spies lose faith
With its grim John le Carré atmosphere, communist Eastern Europe in the late 1980s was a melancholy, out-at-elbow place. The…
Alasdair Gray gives us a vivid new Paradiso
As every Italian schoolchild knows, The Divine Comedy opens in a supernatural dark wood just before sunrise on Good Friday…
City of dazzling mosaics: the golden age of Ravenna
Ian Thomson describes Ravenna’s golden age, when classical Rome, Byzantium and Christianity met
Should we all be prepping for the end of days?
In the Covid-19 crisis the calamity-howlers have found a vindication: go back to survival mode and bunker down because nobody…
From ‘divine Caesar’ to Hitler’s lapdog – the rise and fall of Benito Mussolini
Mussolini dreamed of a new Roman empire and dominion over the Mediterranean. Two decades later he was hanging by his feet in a public square, as Ian Thomson relates
Animation lends itself readily to propaganda
Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian major-general blown up by the US over the New Year, will have seen himself arrested by…
Franco’s exhumation could help decide the Spanish election
I was no sooner in Madrid than General Franco was exhumed from his mausoleum not far from El Escorial. An…
A thought-provoking work of ‘moral atonement’ and ‘comparative redemption’
No nation’s defeat is ever quite straight-forward, and sometimes downfall can bring its own kind of posthumous victory. By the…
If only Georges Simenon had been a bit more like Maigret
Georges Simenon, creator of the sombre, pipe-smoking Paris detective Jules Maigret, pursued sex, fame and money relentlessly. By the time…
The Saracenic darkness of Sicily – the place where Europe ends
Northern Italians often speak of Sicily as a Saracenic darkness — the place where Europe ends. The Arabic influence remains…
The sinister strains of English folk music
With public life increasingly a din of personalised ringtones and phone chatter, we crave silence. Acoustic ecologists speak of ‘ear…
