Emil Cioran, Eugène Ionesco and Mircea Eliade (from left to right), in Place Furstenberg, Paris, in 1977.LOUIS MONIER (GAMMA-

When intellectuals cheer on fascism

Many thinkers supported fascist regimes in the 1930s, a precedent that is very disturbing today

Guillermo Altares

27 December 2024

A famous photograph taken by Louis Monier in 1977 in one of the most beautiful squares in the Latin Quarter in Paris shows three great intellectuals of the 20th century whose influence continues to this day: the philosopher Emil Cioran, the historian of religions and novelist Mircea Eliade, and the playwright Eugène Ionesco. The first two had a very dark secret to hide: their sympathy for Romanian fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, their antisemitism, and their intellectual support for a regime responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Jews. The third, the inventor of the theater of the absurd, of Jewish origin, survived the war and spent the rest of his life in France. They were very good friends in their youth, but their relationship was forever affected by Cioran and Eliade’s past.

 

Journalist Jon Lee Anderson at Madrid’s Hotel Hospes Puerta de Acalá in November.ÁLVARO GARCÍA

Jon Lee Anderson, journalist: ‘I can’t rule out a civil war in the United States’

‘The New Yorker’ reporter is publishing a Spanish-language compilation of his articles. After abandoning X, he says, ‘Social media is a toxic swamp’

Guillermo Altares

Madrid, 27 December 2024

Jon Lee Anderson, reporter for The New Yorker, author of numerous books, biographer of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, speaks a Spanish as entertaining as it is colorful. He’s one of the journalists who best knows Latin America and maintains ties, both familiar and sentimental, with Granada, Spain, where he lived for many years. His history of coming and going across the Atlantic and the Andes has left its mark on the way he speaks the language, with a blend of sayings and accents from many countries.

 

A sanctuary in Rome of the domestic gods in an atrium of the House of the Vettii.WERNER FORMAN (UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY

Nero’s Rome was not so different from today’s world: Stratospheric rents, gentrification and chaotic traffic 

The historian Dimitri Tilloi-d’Ambrosi has published an essay on daily life in the imperial capital, which was home to a mix of nationalities, exclusive and run-down neighborhoods, and where citizens suffered from noise pollution

GUILLERMO ALTARES

Madrid - APR 08, 2024 - 16:08CEST

In the first century A.D., Rome became the first city with a million inhabitants. Until the 19th century, when Beijing and London achieved the milestone, no other city had reached such a population. Although the temporal and human distance that separates us from classical Rome is enormous — it was an extremely violent world, with slaves and emperors — the urban problems it experienced are repeated throughout the ages. Juvenal (60-128 A.D.) had already warned in his Satires that the cost of buying a sumptuous residence in a village south of Rome was equivalent to the annual rent “of a hovel in the capital.” French historian Dimitri Tilloi-d’Ambrosi picks up this anecdote in his essay 24 heures de la vie sous Néron (originally published in French in 2022 and recently translated to Spanish), in which he describes what distances us, but also what unites us with a world ultimately not so distant: Rome during Nero’s regime.

 

Resistance fighter Simone Ségouin in Paris in 1944.

The Spanish role in the French Resistance

British historian Robert Gildea deconstructs the official version of events in his new book

Guillermo Altares

Madrid, 12 October 2016

The story that France constructed for itself after World War II goes like this: the country was liberated by the Resistance with some help from the Allies, and save for “a handful of wretches,” to use the words of General Charles de Gaulle, the rest of France’s citizens behaved like true patriots.