THE POWER TO COMPETE. Born in Kobe in 1965, Hiroshi “Mickey” Mikitani is the founder and CEO of Rakuten, a Japanese company based in Tokyo that he started in 1997. Mikitani wanted to build a business that would empower people to pursue and fulfil their business dreams...
THE JOY OF CONSERVATION. Monsignor Alberto Rocca is a fellow at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana library in Milan, as well as being the director of the Pinacoteca (painting gallery), and director of the Class of Borromean Studies.As director of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana,...
THE DIVIDING QUESTION OF KEYNES. Giorgio La Malfa was a university professor and a leading light of the Italian Republican Party from 1972 to 2011. In his political career he was a Member of the Chamber of Deputies, Minister of Budget and Economic Planning, and...
THE ROAD TO UNFREEDOM: RUSSIA, EUROPE, AMERICA. Timothy Snyder is a leading American historian and public intellectual, and enjoys great prominence in Europe, the subject of most of his work. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a...
ITALY IN THE WORLD TODAY. Massimo Cacciari is a celebrated Italian philosopher, academic, and politician. He was mayor of Venice from 1993 to 2000, and again from 2005 to 2010. An expert in forms of contemporary political power and the configurations of the crises of...
A NEW CAREER. George Osborne is a British Conservative politician who was a Member of Parliament from 2001 to 2017. He served as Chancellor of the Exchequer under David Cameron from 2010 to 2016. He has been Editor of the London Evening Standard since May 2017. If you...
VIOLENCE REMEMBERED. The avant-garde filmmaker Yervant Gianikian was born in Merano, an Alpine town in Italy’s South Tyrol region, in 1942. His father was Armenian, a survivor of the genocide, and his mother was half Austrian and half Italian. As a child Yervant went...
NEW MEDIAS. Turi Munthe is a journalist turned media entrepreneur and investor. He is the Founder of Parlia, a 'wikipedia' for opinion, and a partner at North Base Media, where he invests in media and media technologies. Turi has founded several media companies...
THE SICILIAN RENAISSANCE. Sicily and its capital city Palermo are enjoying something of a renaissance. Lucio Tasca d’Almerita, “the Last Leopard”, is a Sicilian winemaker who is madly in love with Sicily, and he is doing everything that he can to protect its...
REINVENTING LONDON'S LEGENDARY LUXURY HOSPITALITY. International entrepreneur Paddy McKillen has a passion for the hospitality business and property development. In 2004 he was part of a group that bought four of London’s 5 star hotels: Claridge’s, The Berkeley, The...
THE LEADERLESS REVOLT. Gilles Kepel is a political scientist and Arabist, a professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and at Università della Svizzera Italiana. His focus is on the current geopolitical configurations and conflicts in the Middle East...
THE JEWS IN MUSSOLINI’S ITALY. Michele Sarfatti is a scholar of contemporary history with particular regard to the history of Jews in the twentieth century events of fascist Italy. He has just republished the definitive edition of his book “The Jews in Mussolini’s...
SHAPING HIS UNIVERSITY TO MEET THE NEEDS OF TOMORROW’S WORLD. Joseph Klafter has been the President of Tel Aviv University (TAU) since 2009, and he is also the Chair of the Committee of University Heads in Israel. He is a professor of chemical physics and served as...
WE DEFEND INCREDIBLY BRAVE WRITERS WHO RISK EVERYTHING FOR THE TRUTH. Jennifer Clement is an American-Mexican author whose novels have been translated into 30 languages. In 2015 she was elected the first woman President of PEN International (PEN stands for Poets,...
David Snowdon is Honorary Chairman, Christie’s EMERI (Europe, Middle East, Russia and India). He is a craftsman who founded the bespoke design, furniture and cabinetry firm LINLEY. His father Antony Armstrong-Jones became the 1st Earl of Snowdon after he married...
Portrait of Toni Morrison by and © Timothy Greenfield-Sanders by kind permission. It is with great sadness that we learn that Toni Morrison has died on 6th August 2019. Born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize in Literature winning novelist, an...
EMPOWERING SISTERPRENEURS GLOBALLY. Cherie Blair CBE, QC, is a leading human rights lawyer, philanthropist and committed campaigner for women’s rights. In 2008, she established the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, inspired by her experiences of meeting...
FINDING A HOME IN THE WORLD OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT. Rainer Langhans is a writer and filmmaker who grew up in post-war Germany and co-founded Kommune 1, the first politically motivated commune in Germany, created in West Berlin on January 1st, 1967, and finally dissolved...
A WHOLE NEW WAY OF THINKING ABOUT MONEY. James Canning-Cooke is Head of Research at Mulberry Tree Capital, one of the risk-managed hedge funds investing in leading digital currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. James went to Oxford University and networks with...
De Gaulle Made France A Republican Monarchy. Julian Jackson is Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London and one of the foremost British experts on twentieth-century France. Julian Jackson's magnificent new biography, ‘A Certain Idea of France - The...
FIGHTING THE HITLER WITHIN. Gisela Getty is a photographer, director, designer and writer. Born in 1949 in Kassel, Germany, like her twin sister Jutta she is known as a representative of the '68 movement. Gisela agreed to marry Paul Getty very shortly before he was...
Answering New Questions on Racism. Tahar Ben Jelloun is a Moroccan-French novelist, poet and essayist who writes about culture, the immigrant experience, human rights and sexual identity. Tahar Ben Jelloun’s book ‘Racism Explained To My Daughter’ is published in...
GREAT TRANSFORMATIONS. Nicolas Berggruen’s mission as expressed through the Berggruen Institute is to develop foundational ideas and, through them, shape political, economic and social institutions for the 21st century. In 2014 the Berggruen Institute formed a...
LAST EXIT BEFORE BREXIT. Bernard-Henri Lévy is a philosopher, journalist, activist and filmmaker. For more than four decades, Lévy has been a strong moral voice of our times. Active in Bangladesh at the age of 20 and later in Bosnia, Libya and Ukraine, he has a...
Loyd Grossman is chairman of The Royal Parks of London. The Royal Parks charity supports and manages London’s eight Royal parks, and other important open spaces. Loyd has a long association with the arts and heritage sectors, and is also known for his work on...
Lionel Barber is the Editor of the Financial Times (FT). Since his appointment in 2005, Lionel Barber has helped to transform the Financial Times into a multi-channel global news organisation, and during Barber's editorship the FT has won many international awards for...
A CENTRE FOR DIALOGUE AND COEXISTENCE. Simonetta Della Seta is the Director of the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah (MEIS) in Ferrara. Simonetta Della Seta you were appointed Director of MEIS in June 2016. Can you describe the museum for me? The...
A MOMENT OF TRANSITION. Dame Minouche Shafik is Director of LSE (The London School of Economics and Political Science). LSE just won the Queen's Anniversary Prize for training, research and policy formation for cities of the future. LSE Cities researches how to make...
On February 14th 2018 Raffaele Trombetta presented his letters of credence to HM Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace and was officially recognised by Her Majesty’s government as the new representative of Italy to St James’s Court. His Excellency Ambassador Trombetta...
Paolo Tumminelli, you are a Milanese architect specialising in automobile culture and you wrote a trilogy “Car Design”. Is this choice a passion of yours? I think it’s a bit in my DNA. Each one of us has an automobile history in his own memory. We were born and raised...
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Money Must Stay in the Family
The plot of Money Must Stay in the Family, unfolds around the family matriarch’s last will and traces the story of an upper class Jewish family from Turin, the fictional Ottolenghis. The multigenerational saga begins with the flight from Mussolini’s Racial Laws of 1938 and continues with the arrival in the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the dispersion from New York to Rome, Paris, Tuscany, South America, and Jerusalem.
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