Rome
For a solution to the backstop, team up like Rome and Carthage
The EU is demanding that, in return for a new deal, the UK must come up with a solution to…
How Boris’s Roman predecessors took back control
The Tories, allegedly a ‘one-nation’ party, are currently imposing Brexit on a divided nation. As a result, some Tory MPs…
Angels through the ages
A good question for your upcoming Lent quiz: where are angels mentioned in the Nicene Creed? I asked this at…
Why I won’t be turning Catholic just yet
I didn’t get an audience with the Pope when I visited Rome last weekend. But given that he’s a borderline…
Turning marble into cushions and stone into flesh: the magic of Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Seventeenth-century Roman art at its fullblown, operatic peak often proves too rich for puritanical northern tastes. And no artist was…
When in Rome…
I know I keep saying that in Decline of the West terms we’re all currently living in Rome, circa 400…
The Romantic poets
People can be mightily protective of their Romantic poets. When I worked at the Keats Shelley House, overlooking the Spanish…
When in Rome…
‘Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime,’ begins…
Symbols of eternity
On the banks of the River Thames in central London, an ancient Egyptian obelisk, known as Cleopatra’s Needle, reaches towards…
Following the followers
In his new book Apostle Tom Bissell has an advantage over writers who go looking for Jesus: he can start…
A gift from beyond the grave
Andrew Motion finds a touching parallel between Virgil’s unfinished Aeneid and Seamus Heaney’s barely finished translation of Book VI
Repeat prescription
Walter Sickert was once shown a room full of paintings by a proud collector, who had purchased them on the…
The Mann who knew everyone
Thomas Mann, despite strong homosexual emotions, had six children. The two eldest, Erika and Klaus, born in 1905 and 1906…
A love letter to Italy
Imagine you’re an unknown young writer whose first collection of stories wins the Pulitzer prize. Your first novel is filmed,…
Escaping the Inferno
I read this, Meg Rosoff’s first novel for adults (though her previous fiction, aimed at teenagers, is widely enjoyed by…
The Grand Tour
The Grand Tour usually culminated with Naples, ragamuffin capital of the Italian south, where Vesuvius offered a visual education in…
A tale of cloaks and daggers
You don’t need to know the opera Tosca to understand and enjoy this book about Puccini’s most notorious villain, Vitellio…
On the way to the Forum
It’s strange that tourists rarely visit the most famous site in Roman history. The spot in Pompey’s assembly hall where…
Long life
The 1960s were already more than halfway over when I realised that I was living through what was supposed to…
The dreamer
Ian Thomson on the creative limbo that spawned Fellini’s modernist masterpiece, 8½
The Vatican
The sun has only just risen in Rome and we are standing bleary-eyed in a short queue outside the Vatican.…
Sicily
Syracuse is a handsome place, steeped in a rich historical broth. At the tip sits Ortygia, an island offshoot, which…
Long before the Magna Carta
Important as the Magna Carta (ad 1215) has been as a founding myth for everything we hold dear about law…
Divinely decorative
Italian cabinets and tables decorated with inlaid semi-precious stones known as ‘pietre dure’ were a ‘must-have’ for English milords returning…
Occupational hazards
Roberto Rossellini shot his neorealist landmark Rome, Open City while the war still raged and rubble littered the freshly liberated…
