Rome
How Rome’s rubbish became a political problem
‘Excommunication,’ reads a stone plaque on the wall of the church of St Theodore in Rome, ‘and a fine of…
Tales from my private jet
Gstaad I was very sad to read of Rupert Hambro’s death. I didn’t know him well, but first met him…
An elegy on the end of elegance
Gstaad During these dark, endless periods of lockdown, let’s take a trip down memory lane to a time when we…
A Chaucerian tale: Pilgrims, by Matthew Kneale, reviewed
Matthew Kneale is much drawn to people of the past. In his award-winning English Passengers, he captured the sensibilities of…
It’s still impossible for Horst Wächter to recognise his father as a Nazi war criminal
In 1926, while putting in place the repressive laws and decrees that would define his dictatorship, Mussolini appointed a new…
For a solution to the backstop, team up like Rome and Carthage
The EU is demanding that, in return for a new deal, the UK must come up with a solution to…
How Boris’s Roman predecessors took back control
The Tories, allegedly a ‘one-nation’ party, are currently imposing Brexit on a divided nation. As a result, some Tory MPs…
Angels through the ages
A good question for your upcoming Lent quiz: where are angels mentioned in the Nicene Creed? I asked this at…
Why I won’t be turning Catholic just yet
I didn’t get an audience with the Pope when I visited Rome last weekend. But given that he’s a borderline…
Turning marble into cushions and stone into flesh: the magic of Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Seventeenth-century Roman art at its fullblown, operatic peak often proves too rich for puritanical northern tastes. And no artist was…
When in Rome…
I know I keep saying that in Decline of the West terms we’re all currently living in Rome, circa 400…
A beautiful place to die: Italy and the Romantic poets
People can be mightily protective of their Romantic poets. When I worked at the Keats Shelley House, overlooking the Spanish…
Sex, violence and anticlimax in 16 (very short) chapters
‘Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime,’ begins…
Are Egypt’s obelisks more stunning even than the pyramids?
On the banks of the River Thames in central London, an ancient Egyptian obelisk, known as Cleopatra’s Needle, reaches towards…
Following Jesus’s followers
In his new book Apostle Tom Bissell has an advantage over writers who go looking for Jesus: he can start…
Gifts from beyond the grave — from Virgil and Seamus Heaney
Andrew Motion finds a touching parallel between Virgil’s unfinished Aeneid and Seamus Heaney’s barely finished translation of Book VI
RA’s Giorgione show is so rich it’s worth returning to several times
Walter Sickert was once shown a room full of paintings by a proud collector, who had purchased them on the…
Was Klaus Mann all Thomas Mann's fault?
Thomas Mann, despite strong homosexual emotions, had six children. The two eldest, Erika and Klaus, born in 1905 and 1906…
Jhumpa Lahiri's new tongue
Imagine you’re an unknown young writer whose first collection of stories wins the Pulitzer prize. Your first novel is filmed,…
Coming of age in New York
I read this, Meg Rosoff’s first novel for adults (though her previous fiction, aimed at teenagers, is widely enjoyed by…
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…
Puccini’s villain as swashbuckling hero
You don’t need to know the opera Tosca to understand and enjoy this book about Puccini’s most notorious villain, Vitellio…
Augustus: here was a Caesar! Or at least his great-nephew
It’s strange that tourists rarely visit the most famous site in Roman history. The spot in Pompey’s assembly hall where…
How strange to feel nostalgic for the 1970s
The 1960s were already more than halfway over when I realised that I was living through what was supposed to…
How Fellini made his modernist masterpiece
Ian Thomson on the creative limbo that spawned Fellini’s modernist masterpiece, 8½
