William Leith19 September 2013
Umberto Eco, Italy’s prominent public intellectual, is a writer of novels and witty essays. This is his latest collection of essays. They’re not side-splittingly funny but wry and learned, and sometimes they feel like card tricks. Eco was in a New York taxi, he tells us, when the driver asked him a good question: who are Italy’s enemies? We don’t have any, he said. After he got out, “only then did it occur to me how I should have answered”. What he should have said is that Italy’s enemies are Italians. In another essay, he considers the WikiLeaks scandal and tells us some wonderful things about secrecy.
