12 Apr 2007
Ian Thomson reviews A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories by Primo Levi tr by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli With Primo Levi’s suicide in Turin in April 1987, European literature was deprived of one of its …
A novel from Spain’s darkest days
04 Mar 2007
Ian Thomson reviews Nada by Carmen Laforet tr by Edith Grossman. One of the great novels of 1940s Spain, Nada unfolds in post-Civil War Barcelona …
07 Jan 2007
Ian Thomson delights in Conan Doyle’s masterpiece, The Hound of the Baskervilles. In 1893, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle murdered Sherlock Holmes …
A tale of 1920s tangos – vertical and horizontal
02 July 2006
Edgardo Cozarinsky, the grandson of Russian emigrants to Buenos Aires, is a writer and film-maker fascinated by the culture of dispersed Jewry. His new novel, The Moldavian Pimp …
16 Aug 2005
Michael Dibdin’s latest Aurelio Zen mystery, Back to Bologna, is set in Emilia-Romagna, the gastro-erotic heart of Italy. Nowhere is the pasta so rich and creamy …
18 July 2005
Ian Thomson reviews Rome or Death: The Obsessions of General Garibaldi by Daniel Pick. …
From Jewish cockneys to City slickers
06 Sept 2007
Ian Thomson reviews On Brick Lane by Rachel Lichtenstein. Brick Lane, east London’s most mythologised street, was once a labyrinth of Jewish immigrant culture and Hasidic custom …
05 Jun 2005
Ian Thomson reviews My First Seven Years by Dario Fo …
21 Feb 2005
Ian Thomson reviews Campo Santo by W.G.Sebald …
07 Jun 2004
Ian Thomson reviews Cooking with Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson. James Hamilton-Paterson is a reclusive writer, who divides his time between Italy and the Philippines. He left his native England more than a …
A Renaissance princeling’s magnificent shopping list
06 Jun 2004
Ian Thomson reviews The Cardinal’s Hat by Mary Hollingsworth. Two recent books on Renaissance Italy – Paul Strathern’s The Medici and April Blood by Lauro Martines – have portrayed 16th-century Florence as …