Mussolini
Art deco gave veneer and frivolity a bad name
The jazz style was the blowsy filling between the noxious crusts of two world wars. More than 30 years passed…
A multiplicity of Italys
Towards the end of Dandelions, Thea Lenarduzzi’s imaginative and deeply affecting memoir, the author quotes her grandmother’s remark that there…
Do Russians support Putin’s war?
Everyone is calling the conflict in Ukraine Putin’s war and insisting that it has nothing to do with the Russians…
Low life
Every Saturday morning Michael rises at four and drives down to the Côte d’Azur to the Magic World car boot…
The tyrant of Tirana
For many in the West, Albania remains as remote and shadowy as the fictional Syldavia of the Tintin comics. The…
Italian Notebook
During times of contagion, you begin to understand why fascist salutes were once so popular. The foot-tap is replacing the…
High life
Did any of you know that most of the 20th-century monsters — Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Ceausescu, Duvalier, and even the…
In defiance of Il Duce
The details of Mussolini’s fascism are perhaps not quite as familiar in this country as they might be. Even quite…
Repo women
Aren’t you getting a little sick of the white cube? I am. I realised how sick last week after blundering…
Umberto Eco really tries our patience
Colonna, the protagonist of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, is the first to admit he is a loser. A middle-aged literary…
Double thinking, double lives
Jan Morris on the inconsistency and paradox that has characterised Italian thought over the centuries — and the desperate search for certainty
A passion for men and intrigue
Moura Budberg (1892–1974) had an extraordinary life. She was born in the Poltava region of Ukraine, and as a young…
Long life
I sometimes try to imagine what it would be like being a political leader. I find this difficult because I…
Talking himself into madness
‘There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?/ They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,…
That sinking feeling
When Napoleon Bonaparte captured Venice in 1797, he extinguished what had been the most successful regime in the history of…
Translating Proust wasn’t all
Sam Leith is astonished by how much the multi-talented Charles Scott Moncrieff achieved in his short lifetime
Botched Italian job
Italy entered the second world war in circumstances very similar to those in which it signed up for the first.…
Politics as Victorian melodrama
The egotistical Churchill may have viewed the second world war as pure theatre, but that was exactly what was needed at the time, says Sam Leith
Directing the war effort
John Ford was the first of the five famous Hollywood film directors to go to war. He went expecting to…
