John Davis

John Davis’s book The Jews of San Nicandro was reviewed in the LRB by Eric Hobsbawm. He teaches at the University of Connecticut.

In March 1896, an Italian colonial army was defeated near the town of Adwa in northern Ethiopia. It was not the first reverse suffered by a European army in Africa, but it was the first decisive African victory. A decade later its earliest historian, Captain George Berkeley, wondered whether Adwa was ‘the first revolt of the Dark Continent against domineering Europe’. In The...

Chelseafication

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, 22 September 2022

The idea that London started to ‘swing’ in the 1960s was largely the concoction of journalists in need of a story, most of them American. But in Soho and on the King’s Road in Chelsea, ideas were...

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San Nicandro Garganico is a modest agrarian township of some 16,000 inhabitants on the edge of the spur of the boot-shaped Italian peninsula. It has been somewhat bypassed by Italy’s...

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Feuds and Law and Order

William Doyle, 14 September 1989

Ever since the 18th century it has been universally accepted that one of the main foundations of a civilised society is the rule of law. The Enlightenment taught that Nature itself worked by...

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