What happens to children is that they usually pass from believing that everything presented by television is real to a later conviction that “nothing is real.” In other words, the world has become crowded, permeated and possessed by the fictive.

This article is filed under Essays, Philosophy, Psychology.

Between 1945 and 1962, the United States conducted over 300 atmospheric nuclear tests above the ground, in the ocean or in outer space.

This article is filed under Essays, History, Military, Photography.

The next time you go to Rome, take a half-day to go to Pomezia, just south of the Alban hills, a few miles inland from the sea. The town is unlovely but the new Pomezia museum contains some of the most beautiful terracotta statues of women that I know, dating from several centuries before Christ. It also contains exhibits that trace the story of Aeneas in Italy back to at least the eighth century B.C. You may well leave Pomezia convinced that someone, whose name may have been Aeneas, landed on the nearby coast a millennium or so before Christ–and married the daughter of the king of the local Latins–and had a descendant named Romulus. Not just Virgil but Dionysius gives a detailed account of all this.

This article is filed under Essays, History, Italy, Travel.

These days the historical mystery buff can choose from works featuring Owen Archer, Prioress Eleanor, Petroc of Auneford, Mathew Shardlake, and many others. From a brief survey of the genre, it’s a wonder that anyone noticed when the Black Death took hold, as the inhabitants of Britain had apparently been offing each other in industrial numbers right through the medieval era.

This article is filed under Essays, Historical Fiction, Mystery, Writers.

I knew what was coming but it was always a thrill. Suddenly to our left the world opened out and there was the grandest of piazzas, Piazza Navona. The name Navona and the piazza’s long oval form go back to its origin as the Circus Agonale. This was a stadium, inaugurated by the Emperor Domitian in 86 A.D., that was designed to host a Roman alternative to the Olympic games (and to the gladiators in the Colosseum, that had been built by Domitian’s father and brother, Vespasian and Titus). I never liked Domitian. He was big on public works but a terrible administrator. He may or may not have killed a lot of Christians but he was certainly a murderer of many opponents–until they murdered him in the year 96.

This article is filed under Essays, Italy, Travel.

I was told in Prague at midday that I had to be at the Wilson Station at 5 pm that afternoon, to take only one small suitcase and nothing which could identify me, not even newspaper as wrapping. At the station, the lady explained through an interpreter (another refugee living in the same house as my mother), I would see people I knew, but I should on no account appear to know them.

This article is filed under Essays, Great Britain, History.

Mussolini was not the only dictator of his time. In his Europe, in a time of worldwide economic depression, a whole series of governments were run by “strong men.” Besides Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany, there were authoritarian regimes if not dictatorships in the 1930s in Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, and Spain. There were Blueshirts in Ireland, Blackshirts in Britain, and Vidkun Quisling’s followers in Norway. At the eastern end of Europe lay the greatest dictatorship of them all, Stalin’s Soviet Union.

This article is filed under Essays, History, Italy.

How grotesque it must have sounded to a child, and how frightening. Outdoors, the sun of Southern California sparkles on the watered green lawn; within, the house is tranquil. And here in this pleasant kitchen sit two grownups, his grandparents, filling the day’s bright first hour with descriptions of disasters around the globe, massacres marching on to catastrophes and death by the thousands. And then these same grownups fold their papers, rise smiling and replete from the table to drive off to work as usual.

This article is filed under Essays.

In 1738 came the first burial by the Pyramid that we know of, that of a young Oxford graduate named Langton. After him a number of other non-Catholic foreigners were buried there, and not just English people; there is a record of a student from Hannover being buried there a few years later. But while the Papal authorities now tolerated the non-Catholic burials, they had to take place at night, probably to lessen the possibility that the local folk would mock if not attack the foreigners’ funeral processions. (As late as 1854 a small mob tried to assault a Protestant clergyman who had officiated at the funeral of the wife of a German diplomat.)

This article is filed under Essays, History, Italy.

She smoked a lot, but she laughed a lot too. I could easily support her, I was at thirteen, a good two heads taller — she even looked like Betty Boop! And when her lady partner went ahead or loitered poking through the rough in search of another lost ball, Miss Rothschild would walk on with me, linking my elbow gaily, helping me along. “My poor caddie has to carry my clubs!” she’d wail. And there, at 11 in the morning under that bright, glancing sunlight, facing into the brisk mountain breeze, I’d get a whiff of lipstick and whiskey-tainted breath, mingled with her flossy perfume, her laughter enveloping me in a mist of genial, confusing sensuality. She liked to tease: she set anyone and everyone up, her friends male and female alike; she even set me up. Pixyish, it seemed that was the word for it … yet that “it” always eluded me.

This article is filed under Essays, Movies.