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Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean’s Forgotten Kingdom

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 …

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THE PEOPLE IMMORTAL

            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 …

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Gaia Servadio

            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 …

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