en-uk Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:37:29 GMT Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd. custserv@timesonline.co.uk http://www.timesonline.co.uk Sun, 05 Jul 2009 03:41:09 GMT Newspapers 144 21 http://www.timesonline.co.uk http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,116979,00.gif Rosemary Righter Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:16:50 GMT 2009-07-02T01:58:21Z Whether or not “revolutionary” enforcers at the command of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei bludgeon to a halt the protests against a blatantly falsified election “result”, there is no way that the extraordinary Iranian presidential election campaign of 2009, or its still more extraordinary aftermath, can be made unreal by mere fascists. Thirty years after the Shah’s overthrow, the revolutionary façade has cracked, exposing chasms within the establishment between those who, like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, insist that Iran is still not Islamic enough and those who, while not questioning the system of rule by divine law, unwittingly put the revolution in question by seeking to move on to something more closely resembling a “normal” state. Toby Lichtig Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:53:35 GMT 2009-07-03T01:08:56Z Alain de Botton is not short of detractors. With his self-help approach to philosophy and his television fame, he is frequently accused of being lightweight, populist, smugly platitudinous. This much is perhaps to be expected of a media intellectual; but de Botton is more media friendly than most. Last year, he helped to set up the School of Life in London, which – as well as promoting his books – offers courses, seminars, events on metaphysical questions from relationship ethics to holidaymaking. He is the subject of sitcom gags. “What would de Botton do?”, asks the neurotic Mark Corrigan during a moment of crisis in the television comedy Peep Show. In these pages, de Botton has been slated for, among other things, not merely “dumbing down” but “dumbing out”. Masolino D'Amico Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:54:33 GMT 2009-07-02T01:59:08Z A caption in the exhibition on the Emperor Vespasian currently in the Colosseum describes the Arch of Titus – only a few hundred yards away – as one of the best-preserved monuments from the Flavian dynasty. Yet what we have now is largely a nineteenth-century reconstruction. In 1819–22 the neoclassical architects Robert Stern and Giuseppe Valadier pulled down the private houses that had encroached on the sides of the arch and thoroughly rebuilt these sides together with the attic, using travertine instead of the original Pentelian marble. The inside of the arch includes the famous relief celebrating the taking of Jerusalem, with the Menorah looted from the Temple prominently displayed. Indeed until 1846, when the ceremony was abolished, every new pope’s inaugural procession passed through the arch, where a Jew was obliged to stand and pay homage to the leader of the Roman Catholic Church. Peter Hainsworth Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:44:38 GMT 2009-07-02T02:00:37Z Poets usually write about themselves, even when they are pretending not to. But few can have put themselves forward quite so much as Umberto Saba, the Triestine writer who has sometimes been rated one of Italy’s best poets of the twentieth century and who, in his own opinion, was quite simply the greatest since Leopardi. What is strange is that the more you read Saba, the less the “autolatria” or self-worship, as Montale called it, seems off-putting. Rather than self-aggrandizement, it comes over more as an unstable, knowing series of self-projections, which the reader is implicitly asked to recognize and empathize with and which, when everything goes well, give rise to poetry. Saba freely acknowledged that it didn’t always go well, but the one thing he was convinced about all his life was that great poetry, including his own best work, provided a special kind of enjoyment that made up for the misery and confusion from which it emerged, not just for himself (he was a lifelong depressive) but for everyone. You don’t have to take him at his word to feel that some of his poems combine wonderful qualities of song with emotional density in a way that is rare in modern poetry and that others subtly and often ironically recast traditional Italian poetry from within rather than by taking it apart. “M’incantò la rima fiore / amore, / la più antica difficile del mondo”, he wrote in a short late poem – “I was enchanted by the rhyme June, / moon, the oldest and most stubborn in the world”, in the version given here by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan who find plausible English equivalents for the rhyme “fiore / amore” but distort “difficile” with “stubborn”. Perhaps it was indeed a kind of lowest common denominator of the Italian tradition that he worked with, though he added a dose of Heine to give it a tart edge and a certain syntactic awkwardness which stops the reader from being too carried away by the flow.