"King Umberto and I abstained from voting." This interview with the last Queen of Italy was made in the Summer of 1996, when Maria José had been back from Mexico for a year. She had lived there since 1991 in a house in Cuernavaca surrounded by eucalyptus plants and...
Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs is Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Prof Sachs, how is your battle for sustainable development proceeding? It is long and difficult because sustainable development is a different direction for the world economy. The...
This is how I fight injustice. Bianca Jagger arrives on time. She was once often late, but it seems as if her habits have changed. She is all dressed in white, in a suit and a low-cut t-shirt. She plays with her hands in the lobby of the Mayfair Regent Hotel in New...
Patrizio Fondi is the Italian Ambassador in Amman. Does serving as an ambassador in Amman today mean living with a lot of pressure? Above all, it means being vigilant and not just in the obvious sense of being prudent and taking all reasonable precautions for the...
Leah Rabin: “We have to trust the idea of peace.” “Arafat is a sincere partner, he has become our friend.” “Israel, enough with the arrogance.” Leah Rabin was the widow of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995. She died in November 2000...
Intolerance is more dangerous than Nazism or Fascism or Communism. We are having lunch in the bow-windowed living room in Lord Weidenfeld's beautiful apartment on Chelsea Embankment, overlooking the Thames. There are books everywhere, a piano, and Old Master paintings...
Interview with an angry writer. Gore Vidal: “The Attorney General is nothing but a puppet. Let me tell you about this massive conspiracy.” Gore Vidal, you followed President Clinton's speech on TV at your house in Ravello. What do you think about it? In a few words,...
Kerry is in her office on Madison Avenue in New York. She is President of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. As a child in a very privileged condition she understood how many other people in the world were suffering injustice and...
WOMEN IN THE WORLD At 10 a.m. I arrive at Lincoln Center in New York for the fifth Women in the World public meeting. The Theater is full, as it would be for an opera premiere. This is a two and a half day event at Lincoln Center where extraordinary women from all...
In the middle of the Ukraine Crimea Russia EU crisis after the declarations of President Obama, the world misses intelligent intellectuals like Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012), capable of understanding the many differences and nuances between the Western and the Eastern...
Erica, what is your view of what is happening in the feminine world? I think that more and more people are becoming aware that women’s rights are human rights. The smartest men understand well that when women are educated the economy goes up. Why? Because when women...
Silvan Shalom is the Israeli Minister for Regional Development, Minister for the Development of the Negev and Galilee, and Minister of Energy and Water. It is November 2013 and the Minister is in the Negev Desert with the Prime Minister and other ministers for a...
I go to visit His Royal Highness Prince Hassan bin Talal during October 2013 at his home in the Royal Palace of Amman, where he has lived with his wife for 45 years. The Italian Ambassador to Jordan, Patrizio Fondi, and Jacqueline Beaurang are with me. In the entrance...
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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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