For mine, you can’t beat Eggs Benedict for brunch. Simple ingredients, subtle flavours and perfect textures. But rarely do all the elements align to my liking. But they did last October, at New York’s Waldorf=Astoria; home to one of the more dubious origin myths of this classic dish.

The story goes like this: In 1894. Lemuel Benedict, a Wall Street stockbroker, needed something to quell a nagging hangover. He goes to the newly opened Waldorf Hotel on Park Avenue (the Astoria addition came later) and after consulting staff, settles on “buttered toast, poached eggs, crisp bacon, and a hooker (pouring jug) of hollandaise.”

So almost 120 years later, and keen to sample what’s become of Lemuel’s legacy, I made my way to Peacock Alley, the Waldorf=Astoria’s famed lobby restaurant. Coincidentally, I too was nursing a nagging hangover. As for the Eggs Benedict; all boxes ticked. Best I’d ever eaten. This was confirmed with a second serving. Seriously. By the time I’d waddled back down to Grand Central and along 42nd Street to Times Square to pick up my Mary Poppins tickets, the nagging hangover had well and truly vanished, only to be replaced by a nagging stomach ache.

Perhaps my glowing gastronomic appraisal was emotionally tainted, what with being swept up in the dish’s ‘colourful’ history, as well as being seduced by the hotel’s nostalgic grandeur and glamour. After all, a venue’s décor and decorum, your demeanour and digestive expectation, not to mention dollars paid ($95 a head, plus taxes and tip, in case you’re wondering), can all contribute to one’s assessment of a dining experience or individual dish.

Then a few months after the Waldorf=Astoria euphoria, I had Eggs Benedict while on safari in Tanzania, at a luxury tented camp called Kirawira.  The camp sits high on an escarpment with sweeping views across the western corridor of the Serengeti National Park. Not far to the north lies the Kenyan border and the Maasai Mara Game Reserve. The eastern shore of Lake Victoria is a short drive west.

Kirawira’s relative isolation means that much of its produce is either grown, baked, smoked, reared, slaughtered, harvested, cured, aged, churned, roasted, frozen (in the case of home-made ice-cream) and prepared on site. To say their Eggs Benedict was free range is a slight understatement, in an East African kind of way!

Sure, the poaching and English muffin baking were perfect. You can be served those at your local café though. In Kirawira, the first hint that this might have been something special was the presence of speck instead of ham. Unlike prosciutto or other pork products, speck is cold-smoked and boned before being cured in salt and various spices. Traditionally, this can impart a distinctive but subtle hint of juniper. For mine, the speck option shines.

And if this meaty treat wasn’t enough, the highlight turned out to be the hollandaise – a luscious velvety triumph of deliciousness – helped no doubt by the ‘free-est’, yummiest egg yolks this side of the Mediterranean.

I don’t like the Gordon-Ramsey-clarified-butter approach to hollandaise (slowly heated until the water, milk solids and fat have separated, and then drained to give pure milk fat) because you can end up with a ‘stiff’ sauce; its consistency resembling mayonnaise. I prefer a hollandaise that can be comfortably poured rather than laboriously spooned. Regular unsalted butter better achieves this, which I later discovered is the Kirawira way. Accordingly, only the slightest squeeze of lemon is required to counter the fatty richness of the butter during prep.

So, with all ‘foodie’ things considered, not to mention the panoramic uniqueness of the whole 5-star luxury ‘tent’ experience, Kirawira’s version got the nod over New York’s. Wasn’t expecting that!

A few hours before the best Eggs Benedict

I had risen, unzipped the ‘tent’ and was standing barefoot and dishevelled on the elevated deck wiping sleep from my eyes when Victor arrived. Shook my head and looked down at the bottom step again. He was still there holding a crowded silver tray. I wasn’t expecting a ‘wake-up call’ delivered personally. At Kirawira, they don’t contact you via phone at some designated time, as most normal hotels do, including the Waldorf=Astoria I suspect. Instead, staff arrive at your tent bearing, in our case, a double espresso, a pot of tea wrapped in a blue cosy, and an assortment of freshly baked mini muffins (pre-ordered the night before, which I thought was to be our regular breakfast).

Victor’s ‘routine’ commenced with a friendly Swahili greeting. He then set the tray down – with its Villeroy & Boch crockery and sterling silver cutlery – on the outdoor table before informing there were no animal incursions into camp overnight. A weather forecast soon followed: “Humid, mostly sunny, high twenties, but it feels warmer, chance of late afternoon thunderstorm.” Could have been a CNN sound bite. Probably was. Nonetheless, it proved accurate most of our four days in camp.

He left. I sat. Off in the distance a troop of baboons were cavorting and squealing in the predawn light. Clumps of flat-topped acacia trees seemed to be brimming and singing with exotic bird life. Then a hot air balloon drifted into view. Sipped the steaming cup of locally grown brew and wondered what word atheists use instead of ‘heaven’.

The night before the best Eggs Benedict

T’was our first night in ‘camp’ and following a bountiful table d’hôte dinner and multiple glasses of South African pinotage in the fine dining tent, guests adjourned to the sumptuous lounge ‘tent’ for cognac and cards. But I needed to grab a sweater because the evening air had cooled considerably (after a searing day out shooting*). As I was about to head off to our tent, one of the waiters diplomatically yelled:
“Wait. I call security.”
“Sorry?”
“We are not fenced in. Animals are very active at night. Some come into camp. Not safe to walk by yourself after sunset mister Grant,” he explained.

Actually, this was all explained on arrival earlier that day, but I’d forgotten some of the detail thanks largely to the pinotage.

A big burly, uniformed, armed and silent guard duly arrived, wearing a rather fetching beret. He carried a torch the size of a truncheon in one hand while a rifle was slung across the other shoulder. He then proceeded to escort me to and from tent #6, free of incident. Later, I lost the poker pot in a cliffhanger. You don’t see that too often, having an armed guard accompany you to and from your hotel ‘room’ at night, that is.

Two days before the best Eggs Benedict

Nor do you see a million or so wildebeest on any given day of the week. Our drive to the tented camp in a 4WD Land Rover crossed smack bang in the middle of one of the largest herds on their southern migration. The way ahead was clear as we approached a group grazing just off the side of the bumpy rutted road. But like sheep, one wildebeest looked up, and likely thought: “I’m feeling lucky. I’ve survived lions and crocodile attacks so far this season; the worst dangers are out of the way.  Why not play ‘chicken’ with this oncoming Jeep?”

So it waited, and waited until we were almost adjacent, then bolted right across in front of us. The next one followed immediately, then the next, so we braked, because animals naturally have right of way, and before too long, a few hundred thousand more had mobilised to play ‘follow the leader’. An hour later (OK, it was probably closer to 15 minutes), a gap appeared, our driver slipped the vehicle into gear and we continued westward, deeper and deeper into the Serengeti.

Earlier that same day, we’d climbed a hill to try and get a better ‘picture’ of this massive animal movement. In sections they were almost in single file, but you couldn’t see the start or end of the line, for it stretched to the horizon in both directions. Yet in other parts of the verdant, flat plain, scattered groups filled the entire landscape, like small dark pebbles randomly strewn across a giant green blanket, necks bent grazing on the lush grass. Being less than 5 degrees south of the equator, the sun bears down with typical tropical intensity.

Guidebooks refer to the wildebeest migration as one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on Earth. Hard to argue with that. If you time your visit with theirs, bring heavy-duty insect repellent. Hundreds of thousands of feeding bovines tend to drop dung by the bucket load, which encourages a few billion flies to join the ‘party’. And these flies bite.

Four days before the best Eggs Benedict

We left our room at the Ngorongoro Crater Lodge to head to breakfast, and being room 68 of 72 (with the restaurant located on the far side of room #1), there was a decent walk of several hundred metres along an elevated, open-sided verandah to get there. On exiting the room, we were confronted by a family of buffaloes – mum, dad and junior, less than 10 metres away – casually munching the dewy grass. Mother and child looked momentarily at us, then continued their own breakfast. The bull however, about the size of a small car (adults can weigh up to 800 kilos), stared intently. It had a very runny nose. We eyed each other across a simple post-n-rail balustrade, nodded ‘good morning’ and went our separate ways. You don’t see that too often, at least not first thing in the morning.

Five days before the best Eggs Benedict

Still at the Ngorongoro Crater Lodge, we were having pre-dinner Kilimanjaro beers in the cavernous lounge, watching the Maasai dance and acrobatic troupe, when an elephant emerged from the dense bush on the crater’s rim, just on dusk, and casually meandered to within about 50 metres of us.

All elephants are big, but this guy was enormous. He was ‘long in the tusk’ too, probably older than 60, according to the lodge’s resident naturalist, who explained that many elephants ‘retire’ to the Ngorongoro Crater because a lack of adequate teeth in old age means their diet is increasingly restricted to softer grasses, which are found in abundance in sections of the crater’s fertile, but swampy floor, more than 600 metres below our terrace bar. But up on the rim, oblivious to the armada of Nikons and Canons aimed at him, he lazily lumbered past soaking up the attention like a slow motion celebrity milking the red carpet for every last snap of the lens. You don’t see that too often, at least not while having pre-dinner drinks.

Then there was the intimate encounter with a leopard, daily prides of lions to admire, boy zebras fighting over a girl, a family of white rhinos that … oh, you get the picture. Seriously, it had been that kind of week – action packed and incident filled – since arriving at Arusha, in northern Tanzania, ground zero for the country’s famous safaris. And who would’ve thought that I now have a new benchmark for Eggs Benedict, found high on a hill in a tented camp of unbridled luxury overlooking the vast Serengeti.

* Nikon D90, 18-200mm DX Nikon lens, circular polarising filter; Nikon D3100, 10-24mm wide angle Tamron zoom lens; Fuji X10.

Every year, Tim Parks sends a number of his Italian students in the Masters in Translation program at IULM University, Milan to England on an exchange. Years ago they would take general courses in English and American literature; then it was post-colonial literature; now they study “world literature.”

Looking at the reading lists, which range far and wide chronologically and geographically, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Ernest Hemingway, the Tale of Genji to Jorge Luis Borges, it is hard to imagine how a strong sense of context can be built up around any of the individual works. Or rather, the only relevant context is the human race, planet Earth, post 5000 BCE, circa.

The stress will be on the essential and universal rather than the local and accidental; the subtext, as David Shields insists in a recent polemic on contemporary fiction in Little Star, that “Every man contains within himself the entire human condition.”

But does he? Or she?

For most of us, the set of behaviors we call personality, or self, forms initially in a family of three, four, or five individuals, then develops as it is exposed to the larger worlds of school and, in our teens perhaps, our town, our country. The richness of our individual personalities is a measure of the complexity of the relations that sustain us. A word spoken at home or school can be dense with nuance and shared knowledge in a way unlikely to occur in a casual exchange at rail station or airport, however fascinating and attractive an exotic traveling companion may be. This is not an argument for staying at home, but for having a home from which to set out.

Read the full critique at The New York Review of Books …

For thousands of years, the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa has served as a garrison for empires—including, for a time during the 1980s, America’s. On this island, the Romans made garum, a rancid fish sauce. Third-century Christians left a cemetery here. Thanks to other old bones, it’s possible to trace the island’s passage between Christian and Muslim hands until the 1840s, when Tomasi di Lampedusa—ancestor to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who wrote The Leopard—sold the island to the Kingdom of Naples.

The island is nationally Italian and politically Europe, but geographically Africa. This is the problem.

These days, it is overrun with law enforcement types and immigration agents. Along with relief workers and journalists, leery policemen fill the tourist hotels, restaurants, and beaches. The town is a town of well-muscled men, impeccably tanned.  Their job is supposed to be to police the thirty-seven thousand African refugees who’ve arrived on this island of five thousand. Later, that number will spike to fifty thousand.

This massive diaspora is just one side effect of the Arab Spring; it’s also a business. To keep this refugee crisis under control—and to monitor who heads north—Italy collects money from the rest of the European Union. It’s a spectacular show when the open, wooden boats come in, people huddled against the gunwales. In this human drama, the police are the supporting actors. So are the journalists like me, struggling against the cordon to talk to arrivals. So are the paramedics. We are all waiting for refugees.

Read the full article at Poetry Foundation …

Howard Jacobsen, The Guardian

How Charles Dickens was able to lower himself into the black depths of the soul and still make us laugh is one of literature’s great wonders. He took us where no other novelist ever has. And not only on account of what he wrote, but on account of his bridging the chasm between the serious and the popular, I consider Dickens to be our finest writer after Shakespeare.

David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend – beat that for an achievement. As for Great Expectations, it is up there for me with the world’s greatest novels, not least as it vindicates plot as no other novel I can think of does, since what there is to find out is not coincidence or happenstance but the profoundest moral truth. Back, back we go in time and convolution, only to discover that the taint of crime and prison which Pip is desperate to escape is inescapable: not only is the idea of a “gentleman” built on sand, so is that idealisation of woman that was at the heart of Victorian romantic love.

Great Expectations, in short, is a more damning account of the mess Dickens himself had made of love than any denunciation on behalf of the outraged wives club could ever be. Missing from the usual attack on Dickens’s marital heartlessness is any comprehension of the tragedy of it for Mr as well as Mrs Dickens, the derangement he suffered contemplating his own weaknesses, and its significance for the murderous, self-punishing novels he began to write.

You don’t have to like him, but you’re impoverished if you don’t. Read Jacobson’s scathing rebuke of what the BBC has done to Dickens, most notably, Great Expectations …

To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of newspapers are somewhat exaggerated. But traditional media is experiencing the “perfect storm” of declining circulations, collapsing advertising revenues and seismic changes in the way news is produced and consumed. This is forcing change on an industry that has to-date largely resisted it.

Globally, changes in news production and consumption are not happening uniformly. Newspaper circulation declined by 9 million worldwide in 2010 according to the World Press Trends report published by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.

Newspapers are still read by 2.3 billion people compared to 1.9 billion who read their news online.

The impact of the circulation fall has been greatest in the US with an 11% overall decline – compared to an increase of 7% in the Asia Pacific region. At the same time, newspaper advertising revenues continue to nosedive, the biggest decline again happening in the US.

The net result of declining revenue has seen the closure of newspapers and the permanent move from paper to online for others. Even for those newspapers still in business, the fall in income has seen widespread layoffs of staff and expectations of increased productivity from those who remain – the archetypical “doing more with less” … and less.

Read full article at The Conversation …

Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note

Let me jump to the conclusion: This is an extraordinary book on many levels: informative, entertaining often, insightful, sympathetic but not indulgent; it rises to its unusual subject and manages to render its complexity in a straightforward manner that attests to the biographer’s talent.

Last year, Walt Isaacson called to talk about the bio Steve had asked him to write. No surprise there, Dear Leader always wanted the best, and Isaacson had written world-class biographies of Ben Franklin, Einstein, and Henry Kissinger.

I told Isaacson how sad this felt, how I perceived Steve’s decision as ‘‘putting his affairs in order’’ before leaving this Earth. Walt didn’t answer directly, but he did say something shocking: Steve had relinquished all control over the book, all decisions were Walt’s. I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t see Steve giving up control on anything. His fanatical attention to detail is, sorry, was a key ingredient of his success. But Steve’s editorial grip on the book went no further than his picture on the cover. In Isaacson’s words:

He had never, in two years, asked anything about what I was putting in the book or what conclusions I had drawn. But now he looked at me and said, “I know there will be a lot in your book I won’t like.” It was more a question than a statement, and when he stared at me for a response, I nodded, smiled, and said I was sure that would be true. “That’s good,” he said. “Then it won’t seem like an in-house book. I won’t read it for a while, because I don’t want to get mad. Maybe I will read it in a year—if I’m still around.” By then, his eyes were closed and his energy gone, so I quietly took my leave.

Read the full review at Monday Note … or for a different take, take a look at Malcolm Gladwell’s review in The New Yorker.

Photo courtesy The Guardian

Andrew Anthony, The Guardian

If you don’t happen to be sitting on large reserves of gold, one of the few bright spots amid the darkening gloom of the global financial crisis is the wealth of explanatory literature it has produced. The apparently incomprehensible complexity of securitised debt left many economic experts, not to mention regulators, as clueless as the mark in an elaborate con trick.

But we can now see that what once seemed fiendishly difficult was in fact fiendishly simple – it all came down to the blindness of greed – and we can see that in no small part thanks to writers such as Andrew Ross Sorkin, John Lanchester and that prolific American journalist and author, Michael Lewis.

While all these writers aim to demystify, it is perhaps Lewis who is most determined to cut through the forest of dull subplots to get to the action. What he unearths may not always be the main story, but it is invariably the best story.

Most of the material originates from a series of reports Lewis published in Vanity Fair. Put together they lack the narrative cohesion of Lewis’s previous expose, The Big Short, and sometimes the journalistic present tense can seem intrusive or anachronistic. Yet the book is chock-full of extraordinary characters, amusing anecdotes and shocking insights.

Read the full review at The Guardian …

We have no more privacy. That’s what we’re told; certainly it’s something we feel. Of course it’s been thrilling, for those of us with the means and the Internet, to be more connected to each other and the world than we could have ever imagined. We can correspond at lightening speed. Vast, seemingly infinite quantities of information — more than we ever knew existed, more than we know how to process — is available for our consumption at any hour of the day or night. Easy access to information promises astonishing convenience and comfort.

Radical connectivity has also given us information that was previously hidden. What was once unknowable has been revealed: the secrets of medicine, rare ancient documents, R.E.M. lyrics. And all this information is still less thrilling than what we can now know about other people. Once, we might have been allowed to know the town where a celebrity lived or what she liked to eat for breakfast. The mere fact of a philandering celebrity’s philandering was news. Now, we can hear their whispers and sighs, have seen all their folds and wrinkles. Celebrities are not simply exposed — they are exposing themselves. The film critic Roger Ebert, who has thyroid cancer, uses his celebrity to reveal the most intimate details of his physical deterioration, the withering of his face and voice. The writer Tony Judt did the same before his death; the writer Christopher Hitchens does so now.

In the past, we may have been privileged to read musings on death and illness from these celebrities in their own eloquent words. Now we can also watch their gasps on YouTube, can get instantaneous updates about surgical procedures and infections via tweets and pinggs. And even this is less interesting than what we feel we must tell about ourselves.

We the non-celebrities are making ourselves more available, in vaster quantities. But in doing so, we are losing control over the information we considered to be ours alone. We have the convenience of online bill-paying. But credit cards companies know facts about us we never remember telling them. We have the ease of online shopping. Now online shops advertise to us long after we visited their site, wherever we happen to be on the Internet. We want to stay in touch with people we would have, in another age, left behind — people we met on holiday or on the street, people we knew only as children. So we post mundane, daily facts about our workday or our meals — information that used to disappear before it was even registered as experience — hoping that it might bring this giant network of people closer to our mundane, daily lives.

But the mundane information starts to define us; we can’t get rid of it. What’s more, all these entities that we think of as being unrelated — the credit card companies, the social networking sites, the online markets — are talking about us to each other. And sometimes, when we’re not thinking about convenience, or the extraordinary wealth of knowledge at our fingertips, we think we might be in danger. We feel exposed in all this transparency. We want to hide. Is there any place left to hide?

Well, funny you should ask? That 19th century French poet and man-about-town, Charles Baudelaire, might have something very 21st century to say on the subject. Read Golberg’s full essay at The Smart Set …

Piazza-dell'Unita-d'Italia - Lunch time rush across Europe's largest waterfront square - even at the tale end of summer, the seaside city is bereft of the usual tourist hordes that congest other Italian cities.

The modern day meaning of ‘mongrel’ is somewhat misplaced: etymologically, ‘mong’ means ‘mixture’ while the Old English ‘gemong’ means to ‘mingle’. The contemporary pejorative association comes with the suffix ‘rel’, and shifts the connotative meaning to ‘mixed race’ or ‘person not of pure blood’.

Can there be a ‘mongrel’ city? Perhaps you could say Australia is a ‘mongrel’ country, but in a nice way, given the multicultural mingling of our peoples.

But as for a mongrel city, Trieste might lay reasonable claim. Wedged on the north eastern edge of Italy, along a narrow sliver of land between the Adriatic Sea and limestone karst hills of Slovenia, it is essentially an Austro-Hungarian city with an Italian-speaking majority. But listen carefully in the cafes and piazzas, in buses and bars, and you hear a ‘mixture’ of languages spoken by locals whose heritage could have originated in Austria, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Turkey or even Greece.

This ‘mingling’ of languages is evident in the local dialect, Triestine; at once recognisable to Venetians (a mere 110 kilometers away), is jarring to linguistic purists of Tuscany and Roma further south. The historical hodgepodge is also on display in many buffet menus; buffets being Trieste’s culinary specialty. Pork knuckle and sauerkraut listed alongside trans-Danubian dumplings alongside Slavic veal steaks alongside Austrian strudel. But this is Italy don’t forget, so you can start with antipasto and finish with gelato. And at the fruit and veg market, bananas are less than 1 euro per kilo.

As for political parentage, Trieste certainly has a ‘mixed’ history. It began life as a Roman colony, became a Byzantine military outpost, and following Lombard and Venetian invasions, sought voluntary protection under Austrian rule. It soon became a maritime epicentre for the Hapsburg empire (being their sole outlet to the sea), before being ceded to Italy in the aftermath of World War 1. With World War II came German occupation. Post war saw a semi-autonomous city-state emerge before ‘returning’ to Italy in 1954. Which partly explains why this ‘orphan’ city feels a bit unloved, even slightly isolated, an anomalous legacy of ‘Mittleleuropa’ in a type of ‘no man’s land’ between West and East.

This multi-national melting pot of rulers and ruled arguably explains the city’s reputation as a haven for distinguished exiles, misfits and eccentrics, notably writers and thinkers, of whom Trieste has hosted its fair share. Casanova’s memoirs end in Trieste; Stendahl was consul here; Sigmund Freud studied here; Rainer Maria Rilke composed the Duino Elegies here; James Joyce accomplished most of his life’s work here; and Italo Svevo was born and raised here. Travel essayist Jan Morris suggests Trieste might be “The Meaning of Nowhere”, a cryptic city that “offers no unforgettable landmark, no universally familiar melody, no unmistakable cuisine, hardly a single native name that anyone knows”.

As befitting this culture of tolerance, I noticed the few African immigrants, men as dark as the night selling trinkets on the street, were never admonished or dismissed by locals as they were elsewhere in Italy, often with vehement rancour. Here, a courteous wave and a polite “no grazie” was the standard response.

And tolerance is not restricted to race or nationality. Residents need to be tolerant of the weather too. It’s a land of fierce winds, year-round, yet the built landscape is mitigated by the muted splendour of its ‘mixed’ architectural comforts, especially the grand cafe houses, like San Marco and Tommaseo. Franseco Illy (of Hungarian heritage) invented modern espresso technology here in 1935, and coffee processing remains the city’s main industry. With the majority of cafes using the local brew, this is heaven for coffee snobs. The Illy company is still based in Trieste; grandson Riccardo Illy has twice been elected mayor, and, according to Jan Morris, “never wears a tie with his beautiful modish suits”.

Trieste is small (pop. 200,000). Even at the tail end of summer, when I first arrived, it was uncrowded, unhurried, unspoiled. Much of the meandering alleyways and piazzas are pedestrian only, meaning there is oodles of room to move. Edmund Wilson (bon vivant, author, literary critic and noted flaneur) would love it here. It’s a city for wandering aimlessly, for poking around, ambling ‘nowhere’ in particular; the sort of atmosphere and accommodating culture where literary misfits might feel at home. This could explain how James Joyce found himself holed up here for a decade before World War I. He completed ‘Dubliners’ and ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ while teaching English at the local Berlitz language school. A pupil in Joyce’s class, Italo Svevo, became the model for Leopold Bloom, as the expat Irishman drafted the early chapters of Ulysses before war forced him to relocate to Zurich in 1915.

Almost a century later, I’m staying in an apartment above Caffe San Marco, one of Joyce’s choice hangouts. I download the International Herald Tribune and Crikey’s daily mail each morning using the free Wi-Fi in the apartment before decamping downstairs each day for breakfasts of brioche and multiple macchiatos that sometimes last well past lunch. Outside, people come and go, chattering in various languages, while inside, a handful of regulars and early 20th century photos on the walls hint at the cafe’s glorious heyday.

Not much seems to have changed since Joyce lingered in San Marco. Dark parquet floors and wooden furniture carry scratch marks and stains from decades past. The chocolate-coloured leather banquettes are cracking and peeling, and the impossibly high ceiling needs its ornate plaster touched up. Yet it doesn’t feel rundown or unkept. This grand dame of a salon has a rarified dignity that no modern-day minimalist fit out could ever match. Towering windows along two sides let in loads of light, which is filtered by sheer curtains on brass rods at head height that hide gawking passers by.  Book cases full of bric a brac attest to the cafe’s literary legacy while a grand piano and chandeliers down one end suggest stylish nights from a bygone era. The gents toilet is of the old ‘squat’ style. In a cordoned off alcove lined with plush velvet drapes, a local travel agency conducts an offsite staff meeting. There’s probably room for 150 seated customers or more, and at least 50 standing at the long sinuous bar, yet I never saw more than twenty patrons at any one time, and most of these were tourists touting guide books, perhaps in search of‘fin de siecle‘ nostalgia or a late-night glass of Fernet Branca.

Down on the concrete waterfront boulevard one weekend, leathered, languid bodies of all ages, many voluptuous in idleness, made the most of the season’s remaining tanning weather. After some small talk and a few large beers, I asked a few about the proposed austerity measures being imposed from Rome. They expressed ridicule, embarrassment and disgust in various degrees of their political leaders. And this came from both genders. The consensus of those I spoke to was that the proposals would have minimal impact, mainly because most of the locals were part of the 80% of national public servants who have lifetime tenure. So the public service hiring freeze and Work Choices like amendments as part of the legislative changes making it easier to hire and fire, don’t apply. Nor too does the retirement age for women being raised, because this only impacts private sector employees. About the most notable impost these public servant pre-retirees see will be a 1% increase in the VAT.

You get the feeling that many Triestines in this ‘nowhere land’ of theirs, like the bulk of financial analysts quoted at length in the nation’s press, might conclude the government’s ‘mixed’ bag of measures constitute a ‘mongrel’ piece of legislation. And that would be right, etymologically speaking at least. And I still can’t believe bananas are less than 1 euro per kilo.

Photo courtesy The Guardian

James Wood, The Guardian

In the last 10 years or so, the rise of American evangelicalism and the menace of Islamist fundamentalism, along with developments in physics and in theories of evolution and cosmogony, have encouraged a certain style of aggressive, often strident atheistic critique. Books such as Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great have sold in the millions.

Beyond the unlikely success of these books, there has also been the spread of atheist and secularist websites and blogs, some of them intellectually respectable, others more dogmatic and limited (ie, pretty atrocious). The events of 11 September 2001 were the obvious spur.

In The End of Faith, the American writer Sam Harris argued that as long as America remains swamped in Christian thinking, it will never defeat militant Islamism, since one backward religious system cannot prevail over another backward religious system.

Atheism would be the key to unlock this uneasy stalemate. Academics such as Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have broader projects, perhaps – for them, the removal of our religious blinkers will result in a proper appreciation of the natural world, and of science’s ability to describe and decode it.

Wood says he can’t be the only reader who finds himself in broad agreement with the conclusions of the New Atheists, while disliking some of the ways they reach them.

For these writers, and many others, “religion” always seems to mean either fundamentalist Islam or American evangelical Christianity. Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and the more relaxed or progressive versions of Christianity are not in their argumentative sights. Along with this curious parochialism about the varieties of religious belief comes a simplistic reading of how people actually hold those beliefs.

Read the full essay by James Wood at The Guardian …