the Mediterranean
Mediterranean Gothic: The Sleepwalkers, by Scarlett Thomas, reviewed
Thomas tells her tale of a hellish honeymoon on a Greek island with the cunning of an Aegean sorceress, keeping her readers pleasurably unsettled and alert
Double trouble
Elsa, a concert pianist, is starting to panic. Her adoptive father is dying, and she keeps meeting her doppleganger, fuelling an obsession with her origins
How a small Mediterranean island determined the outcome of the second world war
If you can tell the difference between Jack Hawkins and John Mills, and between a Stuka and a Sten gun,…
The cruise of a lifetime: Proleterka, by Fleur Jaeggy, reviewed
Near the start of Fleur Jaeggy’s extraordinary novel Proleterka, the unnamed narrator reflects: ‘Children lose interest in their parents when…
What did the Romans ever do for us when it comes to viticulture?
Taste has a well-noted ability to evoke memory, so it is curious how infrequently most wine writers mine their pasts…
Did the fabled Phoenicians ever actually exist?
So the Phoenicians never existed. Herodotus, that unreliable old fibber, made it all up in the Histories. Is this really…
Homer Simpson meets Homer
Milan Kundera has said that Homer’s Odyssey was the first novel. I’m not so sure — the verse kind of…
Harry’s Homer — a humorous history
It was a certain unforgettable ex-girlfriend, Harry Mount confesses — named only as ‘S’ in his dedication — who came…
From Barbary corsairs to people-traffickers: the violence of the Mediterranean
The Mediterranean has always been central to European civilisation — and a source of drama and conflict, says Anthony Sattin
The Edge of the World: deep subject, shallow history
Michael Pye appears out of his depth in a cold, grey sea in the mists of time, says Adam Nicolson
Civilisation’s watery superhighway
The clue is in the title: this is not about the blue-grey-green wet stuff that covers 70 per cent of…
