Counterpoints

Italian Insouciance

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:45:43 +0000

Author:Alexander Chancellor

Italy's new Welfare Minister, Elsa Fornero, broke down in tears when announcing a squeeze on state pensions this month, but she was weeping too soon. For while the latest package of austerity measures will undoubtedly hit Italians hard in due course, there is scant sign yet that they are suffering unduly. Foreigners note with surprise how prosperous and well-dressed most Italians still look, and Silvio Berlusconi was not wrong when he pointed out that the restaurants were still full ("Italia in crisi? I ristoranti sono pieni!"). London is full of free-spending Italian tourists. After a decade of recurrent recessions and with the heaviest burden of government debt of any European Union country apart from Greece, how do the Italians manage to appear so unconcerned?

Gift for Greece

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:39:25 +0000

Author:Christopher Fildes

Out to dry: Gypsies hang up their washing at Athens's 2004 Olympic site

The Greeks know a thing or two about gifts, but they would scarcely resist a generous gesture, offered in their hour of need. It so happens that their difficulty is London's opportunity. We should send the Olympic Games home.

All the facilities must still be there in Athens, unless some foreign bank has foreclosed on them. They were run up for the Games, which were held there quite recently — eight years ago — and they will only need a lick of paint and a touch of imagination. The hottest ticket of all will be beach volleyball on the Acropolis. That will put the Parthenon in its place.

Out of the Fire

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:34:22 +0000

Author:Norman Lebrecht

He wrestled with demons: Composer Jean Sibelius

No lost work in the world excites such national fervour as the Eighth Symphony that Jean Sibelius threw on a bonfire at his home in Ainola some time in the early 1940s. No Shakespeare draft, no missing part of Goethe's Faust, no canto of Dante's would cause scholars to weep in England, Germany and Italy as they did in Helsinki when the editor of the composer's complete works, Timo Virtanen, announced in November that he had found what appeared to be a sketch from the lost symphony.

Survivor of Stasiland

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:54:07 +0000

Author:Anne McElvoy

I have my work cut out defending to Standpoint readers an East German author who was revealed to have been a Stasi informant in her past and thought that utopian socialism was a better bet than liberal capitalism.

In the case of Christa Wolf, who died in December, it is a risk I am happy to take.

Powell's Penpal

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:43:18 +0000

Author:Robert Low

To read a new cache of Anthony Powell's letters is an unexpected delight; it is even more welcome to find that their recipient was an equally entertaining correspondent. This was Robert Vanderbilt, a young, enthusiastically europhile New York bookseller who wrote to Powell out of the blue in February 1952 proposing to publish some of his Thirties novels which were either out of print or had never been published in the US.

"His project was naturally an extremely agreeable one to myself," Powell recorded in his memoirs, and an 11-year correspondence ensued. The Powell-Vanderbilt letters have now been published in a limited-edition paperback by Maggs Brothers, the London antiquarian bookshop, mirroring Vanderbilt's own move from bookselling into publishing 60 years ago.

Fussball über alles

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:37:18 +0000

Author:Daniel Johnson

Sturm und Drang: The German film "Der Ganz Grosse Traum" shows how football can give national rivalries a safety valve

For the Germans and the English, football has long been a (relatively) peaceful continuation of war by other means. But how did it all begin?

The rather delightful story of the first Anglo-German match is the subject of a new film, Der Ganz Grosse Traum (roughly translated: "The Great Big Dream"). Mired in the militarism of the Bismarck era, a boys' school finds the progressive ideas of a German Oxford graduate, hired to teach English, quite a handful — especially when he introduces the pupils to football.