Publication: La Stampa

15.09.13 Publication: La Stampa

There’s no doubt about it: suddenly Japan feels “hot”, and that is not just a comment about the exceptionally warm weather that greeted me in Tokyo, nor...

15.09.13 Publication: La Stampa

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03.08.13 Publication: La Stampa

Ever since 2001, when we at The Economist wrote on our notorious cover that Silvio Berlusconi was “unfit” to lead Italy, I have been told that there is not...

24.07.13 Publication: La Stampa

I must admit I was a bit surprised. Yesterday I was having my hair cut, in my small village in the English countryside, and the elderly lady in the chair next...

24.07.13 Publication: La Stampa

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21.07.13 Publication: La Stampa

There is nothing that we sceptical, suspicious, sometimes rather insular Brits like more than when someone comes to visit us and speaks our language—in more...

09.06.13 Publication: La Stampa

We all like simple narratives. Yet even our favoured narratives often contradict one another. One popular storyline is the idea that when a new power rises up,...

01.05.13 Publication: La Stampa

All politicians need luck, especially in their early months in office. So the lucky star has certainly shone on Japan’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe. Even...

01.04.13 Publication: La Stampa

What makes a great political leader? One measure, most probably, is whether you still inspire fierce passions, of both love and hate, many years after you left...

01.02.13 Publication: La Stampa

Foreigners, especially journalists and politicians, love jokes and simplifications, which is why so many have reached for the word “clowns” to describe...

18.12.12 Publication: La Stampa

It felt a bit strange. On Sunday afternoon, from a video connection deep in the English countryside, I was transported to the other side of the world and also...

10.12.12 Publication: La Stampa

If someone had told me, a dozen years ago, that by now I would be writing and thinking, and even making a film, not about Japan, China or my other old topics...

19.11.12 Publication: La Stampa

As I sat on Friday in the Sala D’Arme of Florence’s wonderful Palazzo Vecchio, listening to so many young people, from Mayor Renzi to the “pionieri”...

04.11.12 Publication: La Stampa

As we gathered for a convivial Piemontese dinner in Torino on our first evening, and as we drove out the next day into the perfect, vine-laden hills of the...

01.10.12 Publication: La Stampa

Other countries’ popular television stars are generally incomprehensible to foreigners, whether they are game-show hosts, comedians, showgirls or even...

05.08.12 Publication: La Stampa

We should probably thank Mitt Romney. Until the Republican candidate for America’s presidency came to London and made the mistake of publicly casting doubt...

22.07.12 Publication: La Stampa

We in the northern hemisphere are entering our summer holidays in a gloomy mood, partly because we are being joined in our gloom by some of the emerging...

10.06.12 Publication: La Stampa

President Giorgio Napolitano was right when he said, last November when the new Monti government was being installed, that it was a time to tell, and face, the...

06.05.12 Publication: La Stampa

Democracy is, at its most basic, a mechanism of control, of accountability. So elections are times for registering anger, for protesting, for punishing those...

11.04.12 Publication: La Stampa

If you believe the financial markets, the difference between happy recovery and imminent disaster is 80,000 American jobs, in a country with a labour force of...

11.03.12 Publication: La Stampa

It has been a year of extraordinary swings of emotion. When news spread of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident in north-east Japan on March 11th 2011,...

28.02.12 Publication: La Stampa

China is the sort of country, and economy, that can make you feel giddy. No sooner do you think you have grasped the basics of how China works and the...

09.02.12 Publication: La Stampa

Time is said to be a great healer, but the way in which Italy’s image abroad has been transformed in the three months between President Silvio Berlusconi’s...

15.01.12 Publication: La Stampa

The indiscipline of member states that led to the euro crisis, wrote a wise man last June, occurred thanks to "an unhealthy politeness towards each other, and...