A bizarre event happened in North Carolina in 1932: namely,  a group of unemployed people invaded a cinema hall  pretending to watch the movie without paying  any entrance fee.  This episode shows how it was ver […]

The ancient sources about Solon are handed down to us both by Herodotus and Plutarch, but also by some fragments of the same Solon. Another source equally important was Aristotle’s Constitution of the A […]

The Roman Emperor Diocletian issued  the edict known as Diocletian’s Price Edict  (Edictum de Pretiis) in 301 AD to keep prices down, and asserting that they were strongly affected by speculative pre […]

Sterne  owed  his fame to an original work titled The Life and Opinions of Tristam  Shandy, Gentleman which  was published around  1760. The story  is composed of a series of episodes with many  digres […]

One day someone asked Chilon of Sparta which were the hardest things of life. He replied without any hesitation:

“The possibility of keeping a secret.”

Yet there were those who knew how to keep secrets, suc […]

Superpowers in Comparison to Themselves

The United States have no absolute control over the international scenario, as had happened after the World War II until the demise of the Soviet Union. It is also […]

In these days there are a lot of discussion about the so-called Trade War between the United States and China.  Drinking coffee and reading the New York Times, I have found an article by Ana Swanson (July 5, […]

Waiting for Godot, besides being considered one of the founding texts of contemporary theatre, is certainly the best-known work of Samuel Beckett. The play unfolds in two acts, but the scene is always equal to […]

William Stuart, in his important report on White Servitude, informed us that the Dutch West India Company, when decided to colonize the new territories of New York and New Jersey, did so for purely commercial […]

At first, I should remark the extraordinary political and social relevance of George Orwell’s  themes. He condemned all dictatorships, both communism and imperialism. His critique was particularly corrosive be […]

“Much  of the best energy of the world is wasted in living in the past or dreaming of the future. Some people seem to think any time, but the present is a good time to live in. But one man who move the world mu […]

Animals of different species have contributed to show us the way in taking benefit of the chances which nature affords us both to protect and to feed ourselves, but the trapdoor spider is surely one of the most […]

Shakespeare in the Movies

Henry IV (1945),  Hamlet (1945), and Richard III (1945): these films were directed by Laurence Olivier,  Starring Laurence Olivier.

These three interpretations of Lawrence Olivier a […]

The Shadow line,  by Joseph Conrad (1917), is a very intriguing novel from the psychological point of view. The novel tells the story of a young petty officer, dissatisfied with his present work life. […]

Alan Sillitoe was born in Nottingham in 1928 and was an enterprising young man, leaving school at 14 to work in a bicycle factory, and later working also at a plywood mill. Sillitoe began to write in Malaya, and […]