Rome
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The Romance of Belonging Nowhere December 12, 2024
“You’re romanticizing,” André Aciman’s brother unfailingly points out to his dreamy, bookish, struggling sibling over the course of the author’s new memoir, Roman Year. The context of the remark is, by turns, both intimate and heartbreaking as the tw...
What Did Roman Emperors Do All Day? December 12, 2024
Mary Beard’s excellent new book, Emperor of Rome, begins with a timeline of Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Alexander Severus that gives each emperor’s years of reign, a quick fact or two, and often, his manner of death. But these three pages ar...
Rome Travelogue December 10, 2024
I’m in Rome for one week, for two Cluny Institute events. The first, which Luke organized, is a private discussion of Sir Francis Bacon’s 17th century utopian text New Atlantis; the second, the next night, is a literary reading at a bilingual booksto...
Peace Through Strength April 22, 2024
We know a vast deal about the history of Rome and yet there remains so much we do not know. Mary Beard reports in her new book, Emperor of Rome, that the teenage emperor Elagabulus—who ruled from A.D. 218 to 222, his reign ending with his assassinati...
We Are All Tom Ripley April 08, 2024
Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley pickpockets the plot of Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1903) and turns it into a detective thriller set in the early years of the Cold War. Oblivious shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf taps the e...
