Am I perhaps in Italy?

James Butler: Cultures of Homosexuality, 2 April 2026

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750 
by Noel Malcolm.
Oxford, 594 pp., £14.99, June, 978 0 19 888636 5
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... taken the active or passive role. Gregorio then stated that he had, however, twice had sex with Antonio the carver.This denial and admission invites speculation. Maybe Gregorio and Gianesino had not yet had penetrative sex, though the baker who shared Gregorio’s room had his doubts. Maybe Gregorio wanted to deflect any potential punishment of his lover by ...

Homicide in Colombia

Malcolm Deas, 22 March 1990

... in Bogota to the ultramontane grammarian, schoolteacher, Virgil-translator and polymath Miguel Antonio Caro, who in the course of a long life, legend has it, not only never bothered to see the sea, which was then many days distant, but even drew the line at going to see the River Magdalena, close enough for someone of even the feeblest geographical ...

Where’s the omelette?

Tom Nairn: Patrick Wright, 23 October 2008

Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War 
by Patrick Wright.
Oxford, 488 pp., £18.99, October 2007, 978 0 19 923150 8
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... diagnosis appeared the day before Christmas in the Socialist Party paper Avanti! The title of Antonio Gramsci’s piece was ‘The Revolution against Capital’, and his argument was that ‘events have exploded the critical schemas whereby Russian history was meant to develop according to the canons of historical materialism.’ The Bolsheviks were ...

Slammed by Hurricanes

Jenny Turner: Elsa Morante, 20 April 2017

The World Saved by Kids: And Other Epics 
by Elsa Morante, translated by Cristina Viti.
Seagull, 319 pp., £19.50, January 2017, 978 0 85742 379 5
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... Pasolini had become friends in the 1950s, when she helped him get his long poem ‘The Ashes of Gramsci’ published in Nuovi Argomenti, the journal edited by her husband, the novelist Alberto Moravia. The marriage had long been an open one, and for two years in the early 1950s Morante had been obsessively involved with the filmmaker Luchino Visconti, one ...

Make for the Boondocks

Tom Nairn: Hardt and Negri, 5 May 2005

Multitude 
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
Hamish Hamilton, 426 pp., £20, January 2005, 0 241 14240 7
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... in a more than bureaucratic sense had arrived. Its artificers were new too: the intellectuals. As Gramsci wrote in the Prison Notebooks, the function of modern intellectuals is inseparable from being torn between past and future. Their task is to reconcile the ‘tradition’ of established rulers with the inescapable appeal of the new, whether by compromise ...

Lula’s Brazil

Perry Anderson, 31 March 2011

... fashion. The single most powerful figure in the government was the minister of finance, Antonio Palocci, a mayor from the interior of São Paulo, who had been the inspiration behind the ‘Letter to the Brazilians’, Lula’s electoral billet-doux to the business community, and the key broker for the PT’s backdoor transactions with banks and ...

Confronting Defeat

Perry Anderson: Hobsbawm’s Histories, 17 October 2002

... recurs all too frequently in Interesting Times, assigned to thinkers like Raymond Williams or Gramsci. Perhaps there is an earlier strain of plumpes Denken too. These might help explain the curious absence of ideas from his self-portrait. Or more simply, setting aside any cultural factors, there could be a temperament in which a no-nonsense ...

Bolsonaro’s Brazil

Perry Anderson, 7 February 2019

... of prime minister), was the most notoriously corrupt single politician in the ranks of the PT, Antonio Palocci, the toast of big business when he was Lula’s finance minister, before being forced to resign after a particularly ugly scandal in 2006. His reappearance in 2010 was greeted with delight by the Economist, but it soon emerged that in the interim ...