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Obituary | Her father’s keeper Mary de Rachewiltz devoted her life to defending Ezra Pound

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  Obituary | Her father’s keeper Mary de Rachewiltz devoted her life to defending Ezra Pound The poet and translator of “The Cantos” died on July 24th, aged 101 Save Share Photograph: Getty Images Aug 20th 2026 | 5 min read Listen to this story S he was still awake when the tall bearded man came into her bedroom to say goodnight. She had hoped he would. Though she was nine, it was a rare treat to get a visit from her father. By the light of the kerosene lamp, he looked at her hands. Her fingernails were filthy. Then he started to rummage in his luggage, for sweets, she hoped. Instead he brought out scissors and, carefully, cleaned and cut her nails. He asked her then, where was her toothbrush? It was somewhere. The next day, he took her to buy one. This happened in Gais, in South Tyrol, in the house of two kind farm-folk, Mamme and Tatte, who cared for abandoned children. But she was not abandoned, quite. Her parents, the poet Ezra Pound and his mistress Olga Rudge, a violinist (T...
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Mario Vargas Llosa was shaped by authoritarianism

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  Obituary | A passion for freedom Mario Vargas Llosa was shaped by authoritarianism The Peruvian novelist and liberal died on April 13th, aged 89 Save Share Photograph: Getty Images Apr 15th 2025 | 5 min read Listen to this story H is manners were impeccable. That was the first impression Mario Vargas Llosa made on others. He was polite and cordial, his fluent conversation punctured by the tic of a nervous laugh. Yet, as with many great rationalists, beneath the polished surface lay a man of passion. In his case, it was a passion for freedom—cultural, political and personal. From that came the themes that lay at the heart of many of his novels: the struggle of the individual against dictatorship, and the temptation of utopia, deadly when applied to politics (as it so often was in Latin America). In that field, he was not just an acute observer but also an unsuccessful participant. He discovered politics at the age of 12, when General Manuel Odría overthrew a democratic governmen...
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An Epic for the Ages The Odyssey

  Daisy Dunn An Epic for the Ages The Odyssey By Christopher Nolan (dir) 172 minutes   There is a moment in Chris-topher Nolan’s The Odyssey in which Odysseus (Matt Damon) ponders a mistake. The hero had assumed that the Cyclops was dumb – the giant certainly voiced no review of his meal of Greek soldier with helmet-­crest garnish. It is only when Odysseus leaves his cave that he realises the Cyclops could speak all along. Why hadn’t the monster said anything while they were anxiously plotting in his midst, one of Odysseus’s men asks. ‘Do you talk to ants?’ Odysseus replies. Here is a flash of the man Odysseus was before ten years of war got into his veins. Dry-witted, clever, deceptively self-contained, he was, so Homer defined him, polytropos – a man of myriad ways and unfathomable depths. We see less of the tricksy side of Odysseus’s character in the film; the omission of the famous ‘Nobody’ trick, in which the Greek deceives the Cyclops as to his true identity, will frust...
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