Published: 19 February 2014
A Year in Jamaica by Diana Lawes. Eliabeth Barrett Browning was the daughter of the Jamaica slave-driver and sugar baron Edward Barrett. Everything that the poet’s father owned, and all that emancipation in 1838 forced his family to give up, came from the West Indian slave trade. The underside of the slave system that brought…
Published: 19 November 2008
Stupendous, Miserable City by David Rhodes. It might make one in love with death?, declared Shelley, to be buried in so sweet a place. Keats, on his deathbed, hearing that daisies and anemones grew wild on the graves there, rejoiced, saying that he already felt the flowers growing over him?. They were referring to the Protestant cemetery in Rome…
Published: 20 December 2013
Transit by Ann Seghers.
Published: 18 October 2013
The Italian Townscape by Ivo de Wolfe.
Published: 13 September 2013
Article on Primo Levi and the Italian anti-Fascist Resistance. According to his military papers, Primo Levi entered the Italian Resistance on October 1, 1943, three weeks after the German occupation of Northern Italy. He was affiliated to a Free Italy partisan “band” made up of army stragglers and a handful of Jews seeking salvation.
Sicily: A Cultural History by Joseph Farrell.
Published: 28 June 2013
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. Translated by J. G. Nichols.
Published: 03 August 2007
The Birthday Party by Panos Karnezis. A doctor has been flown in to perform the abortion. Timoleon, it emerges, does not approve of the man who has made his daughter pregnant: Ian Forster, an English journalist, and his own biographer. Forster first met Sofia in 1973 in Monte Carlo…
Published: 03 August 2012
The Late Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello. Pirandello was born in the Sicilian province of Girgenti (now Agrigento) in 1867. For all their outward modernity, his novels and plays were deeply rooted in Girgentine provincial life, where (according to Pirandello) “taciturn apathy, suspicious mistrust, and jealousy…
Published: 29 June 2012
Article on the composition of If This is a Man by Primo Levi. In February 1944 Primo Levi was deported to Auschwitz with 650 other Jews. Only 490 have since been identified: the rest are officially classed as “persons unknown” and have vanished without trace: nobody knows who they were, or where they came from.
Published: 27 January 2012
The American Crucible by Robin Blackburn.
Published: 01 July 2011
Il Fuoco nel Mare by Leonardo Sciascia.
Published: 13 May 2011
Wild Coast by John Gimlette.
Published: 10 September 2010
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. Translated by J.G.Nichols.
Published: 13 August 2010
Urban Vodou by Pablo Butcher
Published: 09 July 2010
Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head by Rob Chapman.
Published: 27 November 2009
Article on Eric Ambler.
Published: 03 July 2009
Il Tempo Materiale by Giogio Vasta. During the 1970s, Italy was convulsed by acts of left-wing terrorism. On March 16, 1978, the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro was kidnapped in Rome by members of the Red Brigades.
Published: 12 June 2009
Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships that Stopped the Slave Trade by Sian Rees. In the eighteenth century, Britain was the world’s leading slave trader. Sugar – the end-product of British slavery – became so profitable a commodity between 1700 and…
Published: 24 April 2009
Forest Gate by Peter Akinti, and other London novels.
Published: 07 November 2008
Pynter Bender by Jacob Ross. In his haunting (if slow-paced) novel, Pynter Bender, the Grenada-born novelist Jacob Ross filters five decades of Grenadian history through the life of a single family: the Benders. Pynter Bender, born blind to…
Published: 01 June 2007
Notizie su argon: gli antenati di Primo Levi da Francesco Petrarca a Cesare Lombroso by Alberto Cavaglion. Primo Levi, who died twenty years ago, in the spring of 1987, portrayed his Italian Jewish ancestors as unworldly, scholarly…
Published: 20 April 2007
Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas. Translated by Jonathan Dunne. Enrique Vila-Matas, revered in the Spanish-speaking world as a literary trailblazer, is the sort of writer who enjoys the etymology of the word “fiction”: from the Latin fingere…
Published: 09 February 2007
Guida letteraria di Torino GUIA LETTERARIA DI TORINO by Pier Massimo Prosio. Recently I returned to Turin for the first time since 1994; I had lived there for a couple of years while researching a book.
Published: 19 January 2007
Selected Works by Dino Campana. Translated by Cristina Viti. In 1950, Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote to a friend: “My future life will certainly not be that of a university professor”, explaining: “By now I have the mark of Rimbaud on me….”
Published: 15 December 2006
Carte Blanche by Carlo Lucarelli. Translated by Michael Reynolds. Carlo Lucarelli, born in Italy in 1960, borrows from Hollywood noir as well as the Sicilian thrillers of Leonardo Sciascia to create his own distinctively gritty…
Graham Greene, uneasy Catholic
Published: 22 August 2006
Article on Greene and the Tablet. In 1939 Graham Greene wrote to his brother Hugh: “A new shade of knickers and nightdresses has been named Brighton Rock by Peter Jones”, adding: “Is this fame?”. Greene was then thirty-five: Brighton Rock (1938) was his first critically acclaimed religious novel. It describes a betrayal of…
Published: 23 June 2006
For Nothing at All by Garfield Ellis. Garfield Ellis, who was born in Jamaica in 1960, is one of Jamaica’s most promising writers. In his third novel, For Nothing At All, he looks at the violent gun culture in the West Indian…
