Articles

05.12.11 Publication: The Times

We know our traditional response, for Punch recorded it a century and a half ago: “Who’s ‘im Bill? A stranger? ‘Eave ‘arf a brick at im.” And when...

13.11.11 Publication: La Stampa

Watching Italy during the past few years has been like watching a slow-motion car crash. Or perhaps a better, more English analogy would be to compare il Bel...

11.11.11 Publication: The Times

Nothing, as Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth, became him more than the manner of his leaving. Except that in Silvio Berlusconi’s case it should not be meant as a...

07.11.11 Publication: The Times

Nicolas Sarkozy has made it perfectly clear that he is not keen on more lectures from the “I’m alright Jacques” Brits about what needs to be done to...

02.11.11 Publication: La Stampa

What is credibility? In one of his films, Groucho Marx might have said that credibility, alongside integrity, is essential in life, and if you can fake that,...

10.10.11 Publication: The Times

Forget the Black Death. Forget, too, the South Sea Bubble of 1720, the Baring crisis of 1890 and even the Great Depression of the 1930s. According to Sir...

05.10.11 Publication: La Stampa

Having spent most of September in Perugia, I know that it usually feels delightfully isolated from the outside world, except of course that it is full of...

05.10.11 Publication: La Stampa

Having spent most of September in Perugia, I know that it usually feels delightfully isolated from the outside world, except of course that it is full of...

26.09.11 Publication: The Times

So now we know: “They have six weeks to resolve this crisis”, declared George Osborne, while in Washington, DC, for the mass meetings of finance ministers...

05.09.11 Publication: The Times

Do you remember the video of Osama bin Laden watching himself on television in his house in Abbottabad, which the Americans released just after having killed...

22.08.11 Publication: The Times

Here is some news that might brighten up this gloomy August: the world economy is not about to enter a new recession. The main reason for this bold, nay...

10.08.11 Publication: La Stampa

He won’t think this very often, but as he returned home early from his Italian holiday to take charge of the emergency, the British prime minister, David...

08.08.11 Publication: The Times

It was a week on the wild side, and this week promises to be a tad tumultuous too, thanks to the first ever downgrading of America’s  sovereign credit...

05.08.11 Publication: La Stampa

The turmoil in financial markets is almost enough to make you agree with the President of the Council: Italy looks like the victim of this crisis, not its...

01.08.11 Publication: The Times

The Founding Fathers must be chuckling in their graves. They designed the American constitution, with all its checks and balances, expressly to thwart decisive...

20.07.11 Publication: La Stampa

British scandals, it should now be abundantly clear, work quite differently from Italian ones. In Italy, scandals start with a seemingly huge revelation and...

18.07.11 Publication: The Times

It is tempting to blame Silvio Berlusconi for the way in which Italy has found itself in the financial markets’ gunsights, and like the country’s prime...

18.07.11 Publication: L´espresso

Throughout the global financial crisis and then more recently the euro-zone government debt crisis, actions and events that were described as unthinkable or...

10.07.11 Publication: La Stampa

During the past two years of writing and talking a lot about Italy, whenever I have said something critical about weaknesses in the Italian economy, almost...

07.07.11 Publication: La Stampa

British journalists can often be annoyingly arrogant and self-important, even while they pretend to disparage themselves as being even less popular than...

07.07.11 Publication: La Stampa

British journalists can often be annoyingly arrogant and self-important, even while they pretend to disparage themselves as being even less popular than...

04.07.11 Publication: The Times

If you want a sense of time standing still, go to the “demilitarized zone” between North and South Korea and the place where the truce was signed between...

28.06.11 Publication: La Stampa

In Britain a strange silence, or at least a strange calm, is about to be broken. It has been strange because we have a weak economy, high unemployment and...

20.06.11 Publication: The Times

One of the great not-actually-said sayings, alongside “Play it again Sam” and “It’s too soon to judge” (the French Revolution), is the supposed...