On 22 June 1941, a Sunday, Hitler declared war on his former ally Stalin. The German invasion of the Soviet Union – code-named Barbarossa after the “red-bearded” Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I – was much more than a surprise attack. It was the beginning of a calamity. In his drive to acquire Lebensraum (“living …
Most people were charmed by the Italian-born writer and journalist Gaia Servadio, who died in Rome in 2021, at the age of eighty two. At her London home on the Chelsea-Pimlico border she hosted one of the last notable literary salons; Homeric meals were laid on for, among others, Italo Calvino, Salman Rushdie, Philip …
Founded in Düsseldorf in 1970 by the German musician-composers Ralf Hütter and the late Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk were less a band than an Andy Warhol-like art project, that radiated a spirit of perceived “Germanness” and conveyor-belt efficiency in its studio production wizardry. During the punk-heyday in the 1970s a very British fear and suspicion of …
Born in 1935 in the former Soviet republic of Estonia, Arvo Pärt is the pre-eminent religious composer of our time. His music is at once archaic and abstract-modern; it combines the contemplative devotion and ritual simplicity of medieval plainchant with neo-classical chorale. With its sense of space, stasis and light, the music also reflects something …
The writer and journalist Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in the Habsburg crown territory of Galicia, in what is now western Ukraine. An eastern European of impoverished Jewish origins, he craved literary recognition and won it, deservedly, for his 1932 novel, The Radetzky March. In prose of dark foreboding, it articulates the lost political tolerance and …
