Articles

Book Review: Pedigree by Georges Simenon 

“I was born in the dark and in the rain and I got away.  The crimes I write about are the crimes I would have committed if I had not got away”.  In this celebrated phrase – from an interview with the New Yorker – the novelist Georges Simenon, creator of Inspector Maigret, dramatised his own life with a characteristic mixture of self-congratulation and false modesty.  But Simenon was not just shooting a line.  

Article: Nagasaki  Morning   August 1945

The B-29’s take off at night.  And reach the outlying islands of “the Empire” soon after dawn.  The US Air Force bomb is released through a hole in the clouds at 11.01, and explodes at 1650 feet, 40 seconds later. 

Among the 30,000 people who are closest to the epicentre and who die within seconds are 1310 teachers and children at Shiroyama Primary School, 1300 at Yamazato Primary School and 582 pupils and staff at other nearby schools.

Article: Death in Venice – 2009 

VENICE IN AUGUST.  The coaches are stacking up by the multi-storey parks on Piazzale Roma; the cut-price flights are rolling into Marco Polo; the cruise ships heave in and out, rounding the bell tower of San Giorgio Maggiore, reducing a former imperial capital to the scale of Toy Town. With the annual rate of visitors running at 20 million, the daily tourist total in August must approach 100,000 – while the resident population halves to about 30,000.  This is the month to avoid.  The police have to impose a one-way pedestrian traffic system over the Rialto Bridge.