Propaganda wars
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…
Rewriting holy writ
Jesuits, the leading apologists for Rome and Catholic revival in Elizabethan England, cast a long shadow over the paranoid post-Armada…
Filming the Final Solution
Amid the abundant cinema of Nazi atrocity, Son of Saul is exemplary. Ian Thomson explains why
Diced heart and a full-bodied red
Valerio Varesi, the Turin-born crime writer, displays a typically Italian interest (I would say) in conspiracy theory. The Italian term…
Wild man of the woods
The other day I visited a psychic medium in Croydon, south-east London. Mavis Grimstick (not quite her real name) boasted…
Here’s to Bill
Often, Christmas is a time for moaning after the night before, when the seasonal drinking is remembered (if remembered at…
The joy of physics
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 Grand Tour
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
That cinema is having another Ballardian moment will surprise few fans. J.G. Ballard, who died of cancer in 2009 at…
Cruising
By the end of my ten-day Atlantic crossing to New York, a new wellbeing seemed to radiate from me. Lulled…
