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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

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The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

‘What man is, whatever man is under the eye of heaven, that I burn to know and that – I do not say this lightly – I would endure knowing’ This line was delivered by William Golding in a 1980 lecture titled ‘Belief and Creativity’, where he argued that the knowledge of our deepest nature may not be a precious gift, but a fearful burden A similar insight lies at the heart of Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School, a vast autobiographical novel inspired by a horrifying crime that took place in Italy during the Seventies Over the course of twelve hundred and sixty-three pages the novel moves from a detailed recreation of Roman society at this time to a rigorous, even remorseless account of all that is most damaging about male identity In the process, it tests the reader’s own powers of endurance, and might even provoke a few to wonder whether some truths should never be spoken, some confessions left unsaid   In 1975 three wealthy young Italian men picked up a pair of working-class women in their late teens, took them to a villa in the coastal resort of Circeo, drugged them, beat them, raped them, and then attempted to kill them Their inert bodies were later locked in the boot of a car and driven back to Rome, only for the police to find the vehicle, open the boot and discover that one of the girls had somehow survived, lying wrapped around the corpse of her friend Two of the murderers were recent graduates of the Instituto San Leone Magno, a prestigious boarding school run by priests, and their privileged upbringings, along with their links to various far-right movements, resulted in a media sensation which for many came to symbolise the degeneracy of an entire decade Edoardo Albinati attended the same school between the late Sixties and the early Seventies, and grew up in the same neighbourhood as the killers Ever since, the crime has haunted his mind, eventually prompting him to ask how much he had in common with these young men   

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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feature

February 2012

Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

Rose McLaren

feature

February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer...

Interview

December 2011

Interview with David Graeber

Ellen Evans & Jon Moses

Interview

December 2011

Six months ago, while preparing to interview David Graeber, I decided to conduct some brief internet research on the...

fiction

November 2016

Somnoproxy

Stuart Evers

fiction

November 2016

The day’s third hotel suite faced westwards across the harbour, its picture window looking down over the boats and...

 

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