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Recent Posts
- “A Swarm of Ghosts”: Anna Akhmatova’s Russia
- Saddam and his Enemies
- Ann Clwyd, 1937-2023
- Italy Needs Me: The Life and Death of Silvio Berlusconi
- ‘Time Reigns’: Vernon Watkins and Wales
- Archives of Pain: Kanan Makiya and the Politics of Iraq
- Roman Tragedy: Lucio Fulci’s ‘Beatrice Cenci’
- On the Legacy of George L. Mosse
- Slaughter Commissions: Crime Films and the Italian Crisis
- ‘Everyone Middle East is here’: The British in Iraq
- The Writing Racket: Balzac’s ‘Lost Illusions’
- On Marvin Gaye’s ‘Midnight Love’
- The Queen of Condé Nast
- American Carnage: Sarah Palin’s Revolution
- ‘The Town Blazing Scarlet’: Swansea’s Blitz
- The Letwin Amendment
- In Defence of the Italian Peplum
- The Jews in Fascist Italy
- The Haunting of Yulia
- Ezra Pound & Salò
- The Passion of Yulia Tymoshenko
- GooGoosha’s Golden Globe
Archives
Author Archives: olivercraner
The Writing Racket: Balzac’s ‘Lost Illusions’
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
Posted in France, Literature
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On Marvin Gaye’s ‘Midnight Love’
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
Posted in Music, United States
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The Queen of Condé Nast
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 micro-genre, the “Boss Betrayal” roman à clef. Lauren … Continue reading
Posted in Britain, Fashion, United States
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American Carnage: Sarah Palin’s Revolution
I: Family Sarah Palin was like a comet zooming across the American sky — out of Alaska, a blazing vision of the republic’s future. In the thick of this current political era, it is worth re-watching the first national … Continue reading
Posted in Politics, Populism, United States
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‘The Town Blazing Scarlet’: Swansea’s Blitz
They take you up on Townhill at night to see the furnaces in the pit of the town blazing scarlet, and the parallel crossing lines of lamps…If it is always a city of dreadful day, it is for the moment … Continue reading
Posted in Literature, Nationalism, Poetry, Wales
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The Letwin Amendment
His political ideas are already as antiquated as Noah’s ark. I do not know a single one of the younger men in England who is influenced by them in the slightest degree, though one hears of one occasionally, just as … Continue reading
Posted in Britain, England, Politics
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In Defence of the Italian Peplum
In the forward to his revised edition of The Greek Myths, written in Deya, Majorca, in 1960, Robert Graves sketched a theory: I have had second thoughts about the drunken god Dionysus, about the Centaurs with their contradictory reputation for … Continue reading
Posted in Film, Italy
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The Jews in Fascist Italy
And he would shake his head, with the expression of someone who, should they wish to, could even understand such subtleties and complications, but who is just not minded to. Such tiny fine discriminations, intriguing and engaging as they might … Continue reading
Posted in Fascism, Film, Italy, Literature, Politics
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The Haunting of Yulia
A spectre is haunting Ukraine – the spectre of Yulia Tymoshenko. Her presence has been largely erased from the anti-government protests that have convulsed Kiev since the 21st November, the day President Viktor Yanukovych formally abandoned Ukraine’s Association Agreement with … Continue reading
Posted in Politics, Russia, Ukraine
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Ezra Pound & Salò
I want to go on fighting. Canto 72 In 1948, the year James Laughlin published The Pisan Cantos, Ezra Pound remained incarcerated in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, a Federal Government asylum in Washington, having been found mentally unfit to stand trial … Continue reading
Posted in Fascism, Italy, Literature, Poetry
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