Author Archives: olivercraner

Ann Clwyd was every Labour whip’s worst nightmare — a campaigning politician who was prepared to put principle ahead of party discipline. It was for this reason that she was sacked from shadow cabinet positions by two party leaders and … Continue reading →

From an early age, Silvio Berlusconi had been interested in extending the human life span beyond its known limits. It was an ambition that he shared with his friend and business partner, the avaricious priest Don Luigi Verzé. “We were … Continue reading →

I: ‘Welshness’ and Poetic Identity  For Vernon Watkins, success could not be measured by book sales or critical acclaim; he paid attention to literary trends, but reserved polite disdain for fashionable writers, “contemporary poets” and the literary power brokers he … Continue reading →

That’s the hope I still have for Iraq — that it can rediscover its destiny as a richly various and pluralistic society, a meeting ground of all sorts of creeds and groupings. That’s the hope that sustains me. Kanan Makiya, … Continue reading →

In his 1999 memoir, Confronting History, George L. Mosse described the Spartacus Revolt that had rocked Berlin eighty years earlier and posed a temporary threat to his family’s business assets: The Spartacus League, which became the core of the German … Continue reading →

Review of the Arrow Films box set Years of Lead: Five Classic Italian Crime Thrillers, 1973-1977 Mario Imperoli’s Like Rabid Dogs opens with a brutal armed robbery that takes place in the bowels of Rome’s Stadio Olimpico during the 1976 … Continue reading →

The real difficulty here is that we don’t know exactly what we intend to do in this country. Can you persuade people to take your side when you are not sure in the end whether you’ll be there to take … Continue reading →

During his lifetime, Balzac’s debts were as famous as his novels and more widely discussed than his love affairs. Money was the great unifying subject of La Comédie humaine and the legal and moral dimensions of debt were an important … Continue reading →

In February 1981, Marvin Gaye moved to the seaside town of Ostend in Belgium, as a guest of the concert promoter Freddy Cousaert. This was a rescue mission for Cousaert, as well as an unmissable opportunity: a fan of Gaye, … Continue reading →

  I: Condé Nasties On the surface, Anna Wintour took public humiliation well. It was easier when The Devil Wears Prada was just a book, even if it was a New York Times bestseller and progenitor of an entire literary … Continue reading →