The Passenger is a weekly dispatch on travel — places, hotels, restaurants, the strange logistics of being elsewhere. It is written by Bergotte. Comporta, Portugal, and the particular luxury of somewhere that has decided not to become anything other than itself There is a type of place that becomes fashionable precisely because it has notContinue reading “The Place That Refuses to Try”
Category Archives: Blog
The Reel Argument: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
By Bergotte Rainer Werner Fassbinder made forty-four films in sixteen years, and then he died at thirty-seven of a drug overdose in a Munich flat in 1982, and the output is so staggering and the life so short that the mathematics alone feel like an argument — an argument that something was burning in thisContinue reading “The Reel Argument: Rainer Werner Fassbinder”
The New Dark Ages
What We Lose When We Stop Reading Book: The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate SocietyAuthor: James MarriottPublisher: The Bodley HeadPublication: 3 September 2026Pages: 208ISBN: 9781847929518Genre: Cultural criticism / Social commentary / Media studies There is something almost quaint about worrying about the death of reading. We haveContinue reading “The New Dark Ages”
The Life of Somebody Else
Rachel Cusk, Natalie Portman and the Ethical Problem of Autofiction Rachel Cusk’s Life of M has produced one of the strangest literary controversies of the year. Its famous actress is fictional, yet recognisably assembled from details belonging to Natalie Portman. The resulting argument is larger than celebrity gossip: it asks who owns a life, whatContinue reading “The Life of Somebody Else”
The Human Condition According to Henry James
By Bergotte Henry James believed that consciousness was the most important thing in the world. Not action, not achievement, not the accumulation of experience in the traveller’s sense — the places visited, the people met, the events survived — but the quality of attention brought to experience, the precision and depth with which a mindContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Henry James”
John Galliano: The Theatre And The Ruin
The cancelled Metropolitan Museum retrospective has reopened one of fashion’s most difficult questions: what should history do with an artist whose creative achievement is inseparable from an act of profound disgrace? By Bergotte The Metropolitan Museum of Art did not merely cancel an exhibition when it abandoned John Galliano: Horizons, the major retrospective that hadContinue reading “John Galliano: The Theatre And The Ruin”
Villa Nava by Francesco Castiglioni
Francesco Castiglioni made that declaration. The house he designed in the early 1970s on Via Ippocastani — known as Villa Nava, a building that has been featured in the international architectural and design press with the consistency that attaches to buildings of genuine formal intelligence — is not a house that apologises for what it is or attempts to negotiate a compromise with its context. It is simply, and entirely, itself…
Peter Pennoyer
Makers & Rooms — Essay V The Classical Present Peter Pennoyer builds in the tradition of McKim, Mead and White and sees nothing remotely conservative about it. In an architectural culture that treats ornament as embarrassment and history as weakness, he has spent thirty years making the case that the classical orders are not aContinue reading “Peter Pennoyer”
What’s So Special About Mulatu Astatke
By Bergotte Mulatu Astatke went to music school in London, studied jazz in Boston, played vibraphone in New York, and then went home to Ethiopia and made something that had never existed before. He took the pentatonic scales and ancient modal structures of Ethiopian music — a tradition reaching back centuries, untouched by the WesternContinue reading “What’s So Special About Mulatu Astatke”
The Cult of More
I think about this a lot…by Bergotte Greed, Consumption and the Failure of Enough Late capitalism has produced one of the strangest societies in history: we have more of almost everything and yet live inside a permanent rhetoric of lack. We have too many clothes, too much furniture, too much technology, too much food, tooContinue reading “The Cult of More”
My World of Interiors 