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…
Seeing and believing: the best spiritual films of Europe’s golden age
The Italian film director Federico Fellini was not known for his piety (far from it), yet towards the end of…
The intoxicating languor of the Caribbean
Ian Fleming’s voodoo extravaganza Live and Let Die finds James Bond in rapt consultation of The Traveller’s Tree by Patrick…
An old-school biography, a big subject, and a book as heavy as a house brick, Oscar reviewed
In the autumn of 1897, after two years in jail on a charge of ‘gross indecency’, Oscar Wilde absconded to…
The industrial kling-klang of ‘Krautrock’
The tricky term ‘Krautrock’ was first used by the British music press in the early 1970s to describe the drones…
The story of the last living survivor of the Atlantic slave trade is a high adventure
Zora Neale Hurston, the African-American novelist-ethnographer, was a luminary of the New Negro Movement, later renamed by American scholars the…
Real men bathe together
With my friend Maurice, I have long frequented the Ironmonger Row baths behind Moorfields Eye Hospital. As married men, we…
Mussolini’s fall from grace
These days it is fashionable to claim Mussolini as a fundamentally decent fellow led astray by an opportunist alliance with…
The cult of Holy Bob
The Harder They Come, Jamaica’s first (and still finest) home-grown film, was released in 1972 with the local singer Jimmy…
Redcoats and runaways
Much romantic nonsense has been written about the runaway slaves or Maroons of the West Indies. In 1970s Jamaica, during…
