Rome
Death in Rome
On Sunday 17 September 1820, John Keats and his travelling companion, the young painter Joseph Severn, set sail for Italy,…
Saint or hustler?
Laura Gascoigne dishes the dirt on Raphael
The great divide
According to Nina Power’s forceful and rather unusual What Do Men Want?, we in the West are currently engaged in…
Letter from Rome
‘Excommunication,’ reads a stone plaque on the wall of the church of St Theodore in Rome, ‘and a fine of…
High life
Gstaad I was very sad to read of Rupert Hambro’s death. I didn’t know him well, but first met him…
High life
Gstaad During these dark, endless periods of lockdown, let’s take a trip down memory lane to a time when we…
The road to Rome
Matthew Kneale is much drawn to people of the past. In his award-winning English Passengers, he captured the sensibilities of…
Nazi on the run
In 1926, while putting in place the repressive laws and decrees that would define his dictatorship, Mussolini appointed a new…
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…
