A destroyed city has a certain smell. Dust of smashed bricks mingles with the sweet stench of bodies that are still buried under the rubble. There is a faint whiff of phosphor, the main ingredient of incendiary bombs. It is overlaid with the odor of cooking fires. They are boiling rutabaga, the staple of the German diet in the Berlin of 1945. It...
PODCAST NERO: Perhaps one of the most captivating portrayals of the emperor Nero is that of Peter Ustinov in the 1951 movie Quo Vadis. He portrays Nero as a self-absorbed psychopath who collects his tears in little bottles for posterity to behold and who fiddles like a madman while Rome burns. Ustinov's portrayal is basically how modern pop...
