TALKING ABOUT A LOST WORLD. Ralph Toledano is an art historian and a writer. He recently published La Lune dans le Tourbillon, the fourth volume of a series of novels that explores the lives, questions of identity and spirituality, failures and hopes of members of the...
PATTI SMITH - WORKER. Patti Smith was born in Chicago in 1946. In the 1970s the American poet, songwriter, singer, and visual artist blazed a trail for punk rock artists, especially women. Patti Smith earned herself such titles as “godmother of punk” and “punk’s poet...
AN ODE TO CRAFTSMANSHIP AND AUTHENTICITY. Gabriella Cortese made her mark on the fashion universe when she founded Antik Batik in 1992. The Antik Batik fashion house stands out for its collections of chic, bohemian clothing and accessories that emphasise craftsmanship...
SEAMLESSLY BLENDING ART DECO AND CONTEMPORARY DESIGN. Benoist F. Drut is managing partner of Maison Gerard, a leading source for French Art Deco furniture, lighting and objects, and — more recently — postwar and contemporary design. Founded in 1974 by Gerardus...
CHOSEN TO SAVE SUN BEARS. Dr. Wong Siew Te is a Malaysian wildlife biologist, wildlife conservationist, tropical forest ecologist and nature lover. He studied veterinary science in Taiwan and later wildlife biology at the University of Montana where he began his focus...
LUMINARY IN ART CRITIQUE. Andrew Graham-Dixon is a leading art critic and presenter of arts television in the English-speaking world. With a long history of public service in the field of the visual arts he has won numerous awards for writing and broadcasting. His...
TAKING FASHION SERIOUSLY. Valerie Steele is an American fashion historian and the Director and Chief Curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York City. A pioneer in the field of fashion studies, she has been instrumental in...
DEFENDER OF JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS. Bianca Jagger is the Founder, President, and Chief Executive of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation (BJHRF), a UK-based human rights organisation that defends human rights and civil liberties, promotes international justice,...
HISTORIAN OF THE ARABS. Professor Eugene Rogan is Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He has a B.A. in economics from Columbia, and an M.A. and PhD in Middle Eastern history from Harvard. Among many other titles, he is...
INTIMATE DIALOGUES WITH ANTONELLO DA MESSINA. Marco Delogu is an acclaimed Italian photographer, publisher, and cultural director whose work focuses on portraits of groups sharing common languages and experiences. He served a successful four year term as the Director...
COMMITTED TO DIALOGUE. Riccardo Di Segni is the Chief Rabbi of Rome and director of the Italian Rabbinical School since 2001. He is a retired medical doctor specializing in radiology, and as Vice President of the National Comittee for Bioethics (Comitanto Nazionale...
“EDUCATION IS THE NEW WORD FOR PEACE AND PLACES HOPE ON THE MAP OF THE PRESENT AND FUTURE.” José Tolentino de Mendonça is a theologian, university professor, and one of the most original voices in modern Portuguese. Born in the island of Madeira in 1965, today he is...
PHOTOGRAPHER MONK. Nicholas Vreeland, also known as Rato Khensur Thubten Lhundup, is a Tibetan Buddhist monk and the former abbot of Rato Dratsang, an important 14th-century Tibetan Buddhist monastery reestablished in India. The first and only Westerner the Dalai Lama...
INSCRIBING IDEAS TO MEMORY. Amos Gitai is an Israeli film-maker, internationally known for his documentaries and feature films about the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and personal and collective memory. Born in Haifa, Israel in 1950, Gitai was wounded during...
COSINESS NEVER GOES OUT OF FASHION. Antonio Monfreda is an Italian art director and curator who has become a defining figure in the worlds of design, photography, and art direction. As international editor of Martina Mondadori’s Cabana Magazine since 2016, from the...
A VISION OF TRANSFORMATION. Maja Hoffmann is a Swiss art collector and patron. The Founder and President of LUMA Foundation, she has led the development of LUMA Arles in Provence, an important international cultural project. By addressing urgent issues in culture,...
A TRYST WITH TIME. David McDermott is an artist whose work has been exhibited internationally since the 1980s. In his experiments with time he emphatically insists on the beautiful and the miraculous, looking beyond the promises of techno-modernity and mirroring...
IN CONVERSATION WITH CARDINAL TIMOTHY RADCLIFFE : A LIFE OF HOPE AND HUMANITY. Timothy Radcliffe OP is an English priest who served as Master of the Order of Preachers from 1992 to 2001. He is the only friar of the Dominican Order's English Province to hold the office...
SPEAKING TO THE DEFEATED. Federico Campagna is an Italian philosopher based in London. His research concerns the metaphysics, politics and history of world-building. His books are Technic and Magic (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Prophetic Culture (Bloomsbury, 2021) and his...
A REMARKABLE BOOKSELLER. James Daunt is the founder of the Daunt Books chain in the UK, and has been managing director of Waterstones, the bookshop chain of more than 300 stores, since 2011. In 2019 he also became CEO of Barnes & Noble, the American bookstore...
A LARGE MUSEUM IS LIKE AN OPERA. Laurence des Cars is a French museum curator and art historian who President Macron appointed President and Director of the Louvre Museum in September 2021, becoming the first woman to hold the position in the establishment's 228-year...
WORKING WITH THE BRAIN. Alastair Buchan is a British-Canadian doctor who specialises as a clinical neurologist. His main research interest is how to make neuroprotection a reality in the clinic. He currently holds the Chair of Stroke Research at the University of...
PASSIONATE ABOUT HOW PEOPLE RELAX. Andrea Wong has vast experience in the leisure and entertainment industry on both sides of the Atlantic. Wong was President, International Production for Sony Pictures Television and President, International for Sony Pictures...
BREAKING THE MIRROR. Michelangelo Pistoletto is one of the most celebrated artists in Europe. Born in Biella, Italy, in 1933 and a leading figure of the radical Italian Arte Povera movement, Pistoletto created his first Mirror Paintings in 1961–62. These influential...
BUILDING RESONANT CONNECTIONS. James Snyder was Deputy Director of MoMA from 1986 to 1996. He then led the Israel Museum in Jerusalem through 22 years of dramatic growth, securing its stature as one of the world's foremost museums. In 2023 Snyder became Helen...
COMPLETELY FRESH. Ai Weiwei is a contemporary artist, writer and humanitarian activist. Born in China in 1957, from 1981 to 1993 he lived in the United States. He currently has three exhibitions in New York: Child's Play is at the Vito Schnabel Gallery at both 455 W...
A MISSION TO MAKE PEOPLE LAUGH. Gad Elmaleh is a stand-up comedian. Born in Morocco, after attending French schools in Casablanca he went to Montreal for 4 years. He was a political science student for a year, worked on radio, wrote humorous stories and played them in...
CRUCIAL QUESTIONS AT A PIVOTAL PARIS MUSEUM. Christine Macel is an art historian and curator who began her career at the French Ministry of Culture as an inspector of artistic creation at the Delegation of Fine Arts. Christine established and ran the Contemporary and...
THE ARTIST IS UTOPIC. Yinka Shonibare CBE RA is a celebrated British artist whose work explores cultural identity, colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. His show Suspended States is at Serpentine from 12th April until...
ENJOYING A NEW CHALLENGE. Minsuk Cho is the South Korean architect who has envisioned the Serpentine Pavilion 2024, the 23rd pavilion in the series, in London’s Kensington Gardens. It is titled Archipelagic Void as a unique void surrounded by a constellation of...
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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.
// PUBLICATIONS
