Ian Thomson

Cosa Nostra notebook

2 September 2023 9:00 am

A celebration of the music of Jamaica

22 July 2023 9:00 am

Abandoned in infancy, Alex Wheatle grew up in children’s homes, but found salvation in roots reggae – and, eventually, his father in Jamaica

Henri Christophe, King of Haiti, was not such a ridiculous figure

28 January 2023 9:00 am

He certainly had delusions of grandeur, but his ambition to educate a people newly emerged from slavery showed a true visionary spirit

Violence and beauty combine in Siena

15 October 2022 9:00 am

Siena, the jewel of Tuscan cities, was the mercantile and banking centre of medieval Europe. Bankers in Pre-Renaissance Siena preened…

The invisible man: The Glass Pearls, by Emeric Pressburger, reviewed

13 August 2022 9:00 am

Not all Germans were swayed by Hitler, but the majority were. Karl Braun, the fugitive Nazi doctor at the heart…

Naples will never escape the shadow of Vesuvius

9 July 2022 9:00 am

Naples, the tatterdemalion capital of the Italian south, is said to be awash with heroin. Chinese-run morphine refineries on its…

Celebrating Konstantin Paustovsky — hailed as ‘the Russian Proust’

15 January 2022 9:00 am

When is a life worth telling? The Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky’s six-volume autobiography The Story of a Life combines high…

Dark days in the Balkans: life under Enver Hoxha and beyond

6 November 2021 9:00 am

For many in the West, Albania remains as remote and shadowy as the fictional Syldavia of the Tintin comics. The…

Darkness, desolation and disarray in Germany

4 September 2021 9:00 am

In Geoffrey Household’s adrenalin-quickening 1939 thriller Rogue Male, a lone English adventurer takes a potshot at Hitler and then runs…

It takes a trained ear fully to appreciate Indian music

5 June 2021 9:00 am

At George Harrison’s 1971 concert for Bangladesh, awkwardly, the audience applauded after Ravi Shankar and his musicians had paused to…

My fight to stop the Chinese censors sanitising Dante

13 March 2021 9:00 am

How Dante fell foul of the Chinese Communist party

CIA spies lose faith

20 February 2021 9:00 am

With its grim John le Carré atmosphere, communist Eastern Europe in the late 1980s was a melancholy, out-at-elbow place. The…

Alasdair Gray gives us a vivid new Paradiso

28 November 2020 9:00 am

As every Italian schoolchild knows, The Divine Comedy opens in a supernatural dark wood just before sunrise on Good Friday…

City of dazzling mosaics: the golden age of Ravenna

19 September 2020 9:00 am

Ian Thomson describes Ravenna’s golden age, when classical Rome, Byzantium and Christianity met

Should we all be prepping for the end of days?

22 August 2020 9:00 am

In the Covid-19 crisis the calamity-howlers have found a vindication: go back to survival mode and bunker down because nobody…

From ‘divine Caesar’ to Hitler’s lapdog – the rise and fall of Benito Mussolini

2 May 2020 9:00 am

Mussolini dreamed of a new Roman empire and dominion over the Mediterranean. Two decades later he was hanging by his feet in a public square, as Ian Thomson relates

Animation lends itself readily to propaganda

1 February 2020 9:00 am

Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian major-general blown up by the US over the New Year, will have seen himself arrested by…

Franco’s exhumation could help decide the Spanish election

9 November 2019 9:00 am

I was no sooner in Madrid than General Franco was exhumed from his mausoleum not far from El Escorial. An…

A thought-provoking work of ‘moral atonement’ and ‘comparative redemption’

12 October 2019 9:00 am

No nation’s defeat is ever quite straight-forward, and sometimes downfall can bring its own kind of posthumous victory. By the…

Georges Simenon, photographed in the Navigli district of Milan in the 1950s

If only Georges Simenon had been a bit more like Maigret

31 August 2019 9:00 am

Georges Simenon, creator of the sombre, pipe-smoking Paris detective Jules Maigret, pursued sex, fame and money relentlessly. By the time…

The Saracenic darkness of Sicily – the place where Europe ends

6 July 2019 9:00 am

Northern Italians often speak of Sicily as a Saracenic darkness — the place where Europe ends. The Arabic influence remains…

The sinister strains of English folk music

22 June 2019 9:00 am

With public life increasingly a din of personalised ringtones and phone chatter, we crave silence. Acoustic ecologists speak of ‘ear…

The road to Calvary: Enrique Irazoqui as Christ in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 film The Gospel According to Matthew

Seeing and believing: the best spiritual films of Europe’s golden age

16 February 2019 9:00 am

The Italian film director Federico Fellini was not known for his piety (far from it), yet towards the end of…

Credit: Getty Images

The intoxicating languor of the Caribbean

5 January 2019 9:00 am

Ian Fleming’s voodoo extravaganza Live and Let Die finds James Bond in rapt consultation of The Traveller’s Tree by Patrick…

L’ecrivain irlandais Oscar Wilde, by Max Beerbohm

An old-school biography, a big subject, and a book as heavy as a house brick, Oscar reviewed

6 October 2018 9:00 am

In the autumn of 1897, after two years in jail on a charge of ‘gross indecency’, Oscar Wilde absconded to…