WRITINGS

Here is a determinedly old-fashioned drama, verbose and elaborate but also forthright and watchable in its way. It is a Stoppardian what-if meeting, imagining a bruising encounter between two celebrated historical figures who could, theoretically, have run into each other; it is adapted by director Matt Brown from a…

R. Mitchum, to the femme fatale while framing the villain: When your teeth stop chattering, you get Ortega on the phone … R. Mitchum, alla protagonista femminile mentre tiene sotto tiro il cattivo: Quando i denti finiranno di batterti, chiama l’ispettore Ortega al telefono … https://youtu.be/0SY2PPnIZg4

Notes on this Fall’s picks Very interesting biopic of a lesser-known character, more famous for his ‘deadly toy’ than his biography, which is instead full of strange facts. Who would say that the father of the atomic bomb was a communist sympathizer who would fall from governmental grace after helping his country wi…

LISTEN TO THE ARTICLE There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away f…

Looking forward to the American elections, part 1. The subtitle of my book about Berlusconi’s Italy reads The all-Italian story of the man who gave us Trump. In the book I write that “Trump may be more powerful, and more dangerous, than Berlusconi because he was the most dominant man in the world during his 2016-202…

Italian football: mirror of a society where no one pays Italian football is the mirror of our society: it means organized crime connections, both at top management level or at mafia and camorra rank; it means corruption, in match fixing, slush funds creation and drug use; it means another weapon of mass consent in t…

Listen to the review: A shocking wonderful surprise. A pitch-black noir, darker than the classic ones, in the Mediterranean sunshine Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo My rating: 5 of 5 stars A shocking wonderful surprise. This novel is a pitch-black noir, darker than the classic ones, in the Mediterranean sunshine. Th…