In January 1804 the West Indian island of Saint-Domingue became the world’s first black republic after the slaves toiling on the sugar fields rose up against their French masters and, at the end of a thirteen-year insurgency, proclaimed independence. Saint-Domingue was renamed Haiti (an aboriginal Taino-Arawak Indian word meaning “mountainous land”) and the Haitian flag …
Not all Germans were swayed by Hitler, but the majority were. Karl Braun, the fugitive Nazi doctor at the heart of Emeric Pressburger’s 1966 novel The Glass Pearls, was devoted to the furtherance of so-called “science” under the Führer. In the interests of research he cut up the brains of a number of Nazi …
The invisible man: The Glass Pearls, by Emeric Pressburger Read More »
Siena, that jewel of Tuscan cities, was the mercantile and banking centre of medieval Europe. Bankers in Pre-Renaissance Siena preened themselves on their wealth and material possession. Banking (from the Italian banco, “counter”) is an Italian invention. Yet Dante consigned money-lenders to the seventh circle of Hell, where they are made to stare for …
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 …
