Telegraph

A writer burdened by history

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Ian Thomson reviews A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories by Primo Levi tr by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli With Primo Levi’s suicide in Turin in April 1987, European literature was deprived of one of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 …

 

The detective’s dark side

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 …

 

Italy’s gastro-erotic heart

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 …

 

A tale of the Roman riverbank

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 …

 

Mussolini made me

05 Jun 2005

Ian Thomson reviews My First Seven Years by Dario Fo …

 

A few final civilities

21 Feb 2005

Ian Thomson reviews Campo Santo by W.G.Sebald …

 

Tasty Tuscan titbits

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 …