French literature has had an outsized influence on Italian opera. Rigoletto, Manon Lescaut, La traviata, Tosca, L’elisir d’amore, La bohème and even Turandot all have French antecedents. Less well appreciated is that Giacomo Puccini’s iconic Madama Butterfly is ultimately, if indirectly, derived from a now obscure French novel. Pierre Loti’s 1887 Madame Chrysanthème—-just released in…
Walking through Siberia in the dead of winter may not, on the face of it, sound like a very good idea, yet that is what Charlie Walker intended to do in February 2022. Yakutsk is built on the banks of the Lena River and I would ski-trek northwards along the water’s frozen surface for 1,000…
A New York Times headline from late February read “Cambodia Celebrates the Return of Looted Artifacts From a Tainted Dealer”. It wasn’t front-page news, and readers may have missed the connection to previous scandals involving such storied institutions as New York’s Metropolitan Museum, the Smithsonian, the Denver Art Museum, Sotheby’s and Spinks, all of whom…
That the US is “imperialistic”, if not necessarily “imperial”, has been a point of political rhetoric my entire life. That, however, the US constitutes and maintains an actual empire is an idea of somewhat more recent vintage; whether or not Daniel Immerwahr was the first to make the point in How to Hide an Empire:…
Gooday Nagar is a collection of short stories about the people (or, better, “characters”) of and around the eponymous fictional Indian town. If this sounds a bit like RK Narayan’s classic Malgudi Days, that’s no accident; one of the stories even references it. As a stylist, author Maithreyi Karnoor is hard to pin down. She…
Ichiyo Higuchi, a contemporary of Anton Chekhov, Henry James, O Henry and Colette, may well be the most acclaimed and influential writer you have (perhaps) never heard of. Revered in Japan (she appeared in the ¥5,000 banknote for two decades this century), she is far less well-known in English than either late 19th-century European writers…
At the turn of the 17th century, Florentine Francesco Carletti left from Seville with his father Antonio for Cape Verde, where they were planning to buy slaves for resale in the Caribbean. He ended up in an almost decade-long circumnavigation of the world, the first private citizen to do so. His travels took him to…
There is, despite the title, very little that is Asian in Raffaele Danna’s new The Craft of Indo-Arabic Numerals. The subtitle—How Practical Arithmetic Shaped Commerce and Mathematics in Western Europe, 1200-1600—tells it all. However, the numerals themselves—concepts of great intellectual depth and practical value—came to the West from the Arabs, and originated in India (hence…
Those hoping that a book called Venice and the Mongols would be a deep-dive into everything Marco Polo will be disappointed, for that most celebrated of Venetians warrants only a single chapter. Authors Nicola Di Cosmo and Lorenzo Pubblici focus rather more on Venice’s forays—commercial and territorial—into the Black Sea, where they ran up against…
Those who know other volumes in the “History in Objects” series from Thames & Hudson and the British Museum will find much that is familiar in this latest one on Japan: a wide and often eclectic collection of objects well-displayed on pages balanced with bite-sized yet informative blocks of text.
Historians are usually loath to ask “what if?”, but in The War That Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire, Georgetown’s Mustafa Aksakal gets close.
Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850 is the accompanying volume to an eponymous exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art which places painters, local and foreign, working in India and China in the context of the commercial and colonial operations of the East India Company.
The importance of archaeological developments can take a long time to register in the general public consciousness. This is perhaps because excavations take years, results are often published long after the work begins, the significance is not immediately apparent, or conclusions are denied when they run counter to conventional narratives. Keeladi, near Madurai, is a…
“The goal of this book”, writes Rian Thum in his introduction, “is to reach an understanding of Islamic Chinese history that makes the Muslims of China unsurprising, even ordinary.” The layman who has visited, say, Xi’an, might be surprised that this should be deemed necessary.
Due, one presumes, to the success of his first photo-album matching images of yesteryear with their current appearance, Macau-based photographer Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro has returned with an encore.