Blog – Page 2 – My World of Interiors

The Human Condition According to Dante

By Bergotte No work of literature begins more universally than the Divine Comedy. Not with a king or a war or a cosmogony, but with a man — any man, every man — who has lost his way in the middle of his life. Dante Alighieri wrote the greatest poem of the Middle Ages andContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Dante”

Frank Bowling

Essay · Art & Lives The Painter Who Crossed Every Ocean Frank Bowling arrived in London from British Guiana in 1953 with no art education and a desire to be a poet, and became, across the following seven decades, one of the most significant painters working in the English language — a phrase that wouldContinue reading “Frank Bowling”

Sam Neill, Actor of Watchful Intelligence Who Roamed From Dinosaurs to Deep Drama, Dies at 78

By Bergotte Sam Neill, the New Zealand-born actor whose long, restless career carried him from the art houses of the Australian New Wave to the teeth of a Tyrannosaurus rex in “Jurassic Park,” and who brought a dry, watchful intelligence to nearly every part he played, died on Monday in Sydney, Australia. He was 78.Continue reading “Sam Neill, Actor of Watchful Intelligence Who Roamed From Dinosaurs to Deep Drama, Dies at 78”

The World According To Garp

Essay · Literature & Ideas A Novel About Everything That Can Go Wrong, Written With Love The World According to Garp is a novel about a novelist, which gives John Irving permission to make it about everything else: about mothers and sons, about feminism and its discontents, about the randomness of violent death, about theContinue reading “The World According To Garp”

Stop Making Sense: David Byrne and the Art of Intelligent Strangeness

He arrived in New York with a ukulele and a stammer and an idea that pop music could be the vehicle for the most serious questions a person could ask. Fifty years later, the former lead singer of Talking Heads remains the most restlessly curious, most formally inventive, most genuinely odd figure in American popularContinue reading “Stop Making Sense: David Byrne and the Art of Intelligent Strangeness”

Tove Ditlevsen

Essay · Literature & Lives The Copenhagen Trilogy and the Cost of Seeing Clearly Tove Ditlevsen wrote about the interior lives of women — their desires, their loneliness, their addiction, their marriages, their children, their slow suffocation inside the arrangements that society had made for them — with a directness and a formal precision thatContinue reading “Tove Ditlevsen”

Affordable Style: Inns and Guesthouses of Essaouira & the Atlas Foothills

Morocco’s Atlantic coast and mountain landscapes offer a different kind of escape: atmospheric, artisanal, and surprisingly affordable. While Marrakech draws luxury seekers, the port town of Essaouira and the villages of the Atlas foothills remain places where riads, kasbahs, and guesthouses welcome travellers with warmth and character. Here, affordable style is woven into hand-carved woodenContinue reading “Affordable Style: Inns and Guesthouses of Essaouira & the Atlas Foothills”

Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument

He was thirty-five years old, exiled from his city, stripped of everything that had defined him, when he began the most ambitious poem in the Western tradition. He set it in the middle of his own life because the middle of a life is where the crisis comes — when the path forward is noContinue reading “Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument”

I’m Not a Fan of the New World Order

A political deep dive into Trump’s reckless behaviour on the world stage — and why the consequences will outlast him Introduction Foreign policy is usually a slow-moving business. Alliances take decades to build, trade relationships are negotiated over years, and a nation’s credibility is a resource accumulated patiently across generations of diplomats, treaties, and crisesContinue reading “I’m Not a Fan of the New World Order”