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 …
On August 6 1962, Jamaica declared independence from colonial Britain. The new flag had a St Andrew’s cross designed in gold and green (symbolic perhaps of hoped-for rebirth) and black (in recognition of the hardships of Jamaica’s slave plantation past). What the Colonial Office described as an “orderly transition” to self-government was, however, …
Reggae on Film: from the streets to the dancehall to the screen Read More »
Tony Wilson, who died in 2007 aged fifty-seven, from a heart attack following a diagnosis of cancer, was a music entrepreneur and intellectual maverick who helped to make Manchester the cultural “global player” it is today. As the co-founder, in 1978, of Factory Records, Wilson was among the first to recognize the importance …
Naples, the tatterdemalion capital of the Italian south, is said to be awash with heroin. Chinese-run morphine refineries on its outskirts masquerade as ‘legitimate’ couture operations that transform bolts of Chinese silk into contraband Dolce & Gabbana or Versace. The textile sweatshops are controlled by the Neapolitan mafia, or Camorra. All this was …
