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…
‘Thou shalt commit adultery’
Jesuits, the leading apologists for Rome and Catholic revival in Elizabethan England, cast a long shadow over the paranoid post-Armada…
Should the Final Solution ever be made into entertainment?
Amid the abundant cinema of Nazi atrocity, Son of Saul is exemplary. Ian Thomson explains why
Modern Italy’s heart of darkness
Valerio Varesi, the Turin-born crime writer, displays a typically Italian interest (I would say) in conspiracy theory. The Italian term…
The Green Man's journey from Nazi to sweetcorn salesman
The other day I visited a psychic medium in Croydon, south-east London. Mavis Grimstick (not quite her real name) boasted…
From Adrian Gill to A.A. Gill — with love and thanks
Often, Christmas is a time for moaning after the night before, when the seasonal drinking is remembered (if remembered at…
A poetic and jargon-free textbook on theoretical physics is a surprise Christmas bestseller
How a book on relativity and quantum theory became a surprise hit
Shock and awe in Coventry, 14 November 1940
On 14 November 1940, at seven in the evening, the Luftwaffe began to bomb Coventry. The skyline turned red like…
The delights and dangers of the Grand Tour
The Grand Tour usually culminated with Naples, ragamuffin capital of the Italian south, where Vesuvius offered a visual education in…
Modernity, whisky and cats: the J.G. Ballard I knew
That cinema is having another Ballardian moment will surprise few fans. J.G. Ballard, who died of cancer in 2009 at…
Notes on cruising
By the end of my ten-day Atlantic crossing to New York, a new wellbeing seemed to radiate from me. Lulled…
When flower power turned sour
Aldous Huxley reported his first psychedelic experience in The Doors of Perception (1954), a bewitching little volume that soon became…
Sound and fury — the pianist James Rhodes is very angry indeed
Ours is the era of everybody’s autobiography. Bookshops groan with misery-lit memoirs — Never Let Me Go, Dysfunction Without Tears…
Palermo: city of jasmine and dark secrets
The Arabs invaded Sicily in the ninth century, leaving behind mosques and pink-domed cupolas. In the Sicilian capital of Palermo,…
How Fellini made his modernist masterpiece
Ian Thomson on the creative limbo that spawned Fellini’s modernist masterpiece, 8½
'I will call the police!': My close encounter with 'revenue protection'
Conversations with a ticket inspector on the Norwich train
Life in the LA ghetto was nasty, brutish and short — until one brave detective took on the gangs
Los Angeles ghetto life — thrashed, twisted and black — is not a world that most Americans care to visit.…
