Brazil
The stigma still surrounding leprosy
Though long curable, the disease remains endemic in India, Mozambique and Brazil, with lack of medical funding leaving lepers among the world’s most marginalised people
Was Brazil the real birthplace of modernism?
A paradox of art history: to understand the artists of the past, it helps to study how, and where, they…
Why are the sailors who first braved the Atlantic so often ignored?
Long before Columbus crossed the ocean in 1492, the Phoenicians had discovered the Azores, and by the year 1000 Norse men and women were eking out an existence in Greenland
Some uncomfortable truths about World Music
In his masterly, wide-ranging survey, Joe Boyd acknowledges that many artists’ expectations are unrealistic – and that their music is often greeted with contempt by home audiences
Will Lula’s Brazil turn away from the West?
Joe Biden has promised to bring Brazil and America closer together. ‘Both of our democracies have been tested of late’,…
Diary
Rio de Janeiro When I first began writing about politics in 2005, my Brazilian husband, David Miranda, was…
Bolsonaro isn’t finished yet
São Paulo The polls got it wrong again. In the first round of Brazil’s presidential election on Sunday, challenger Luiz…
Can Boris Johnson salvage COP26?
It’s day two of COP26 and so far the climate summit in Glasgow has made news for travel chaos, Greta…
Crazy cricket
Cricket in Latin America sounds like an oxymoron. Yet in almost every country in the region willow was hitting leather…
Nothing personal
Pelé is a two-hour documentary about the great Brazilian footballer — the greatest footballer ever, some would say — who…
Has this Brazilian city reached herd immunity without lockdown?
Throughout the Covid crisis, the international response to the disease has rested on a simple assumption: that none of us…
Brazil Notebook
Ipanema, Brazil Another Sunday night, yet another episode of Game of Thrones drowned out by pot-banging and angry folk yelling…
The roots of the matter
British people buy £43 million worth of human hair a year. So who’s selling?
Cruel to be kind
Trash is the sort of film one desperately wishes to be kind about — heart supremely, if not burstingly, in…
Barometer
Old world Brazil has struggled to get ready for the World Cup, even though it hosted it before, in 1950.…
How I joined the 99 per cent
In The Wolf of Wall Street, there’s a poignant shot towards the end in which we see an FBI agent…
Diary
São Paolo It was back in 2001 that my good friend Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs coined the acronym ‘Bric’,…
‘The most important Jewish writer since Kafka’
Ian Thomson on the turbulent life of Clarice Lispector
Classics in Crackland
Damian Thompson visits Brazil to hear Marin Alsop whip São Paulo’s orchestra into shape
High life
The long lazy summer is upon us, and as I walk the Swiss hills below the mountain ranges my thoughts…
