Bravo Taraf

At The Spectator blogs, Clive Davis picks up on the Roby Lakatos video I posted the other day, but also quotes a piece about the Roma in Italy from The Times, which rather typifies the skewed light on minority communities that the media likes to use to gain sales. I was objecting to a lot more than fingerprinting, as the piece we quoted from The Independent made clear. Because the situation is a lot more dangerous than that.

As a follow-up, here is a powerful piece of writing by Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu.

And above, an extract from Tony Gatliff's film Latcho Drom about the Romanian Roma band Taraf de Haidouks (we saw them at the Barbican in June last year). World-music expert Ben Mandelson and I get to be their curtain-raiser at the Cheltenham Music Festival on Saturday week, 19 July, which is an honour.