Claudio Taddei was born in Parma and studied in Florence and Rome, where he graduated in History and Philosophy with a these on the Hungarian film maker Miklós Jancsó, which was published by the Bianco e Nero magazine . He first worked as a film critic, and then for some years in the field of cinema production. He is the author of several documentaries which have been presented at international festivals: on the training of racehorses; another on Testaccio, the former slaughterhouse of Rome; and a third focusing on a classical dance school.
As a director’s assistant, he has worked with some important directors, such as Michelangelo Antonioni in Professione: Reporter (The Passenger), and Bernardo Bertolucci in Novecento (1900). He collaborated in rewriting the scripts (the originals having been lost) of Antonioni’s early movies for the volume Il Primo Antonioni (The First Antonioni). He is the author of many unfilmed screenplays and treatments, including one on the life of Kafka, one based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, another based on Borges’ Deutsches Requiem, and a play based on the life of Nietzsche. With the director and painter Dario Serra he wrote Don Giovanni, ovvero Il Dissoluto Punito (Don Giovanni, or The Rake Punished) for the puppet theatre in Rome. In the second half of the 1970s he left the world of film making keeping alive his interests in history (he is the author of studies on the origins of the First World War) and in the events of his own time, as well as his old passion for literature. This last interest led him to write the essay Joseph Conrad, a work which took a long time to complete, and which was published in 2006. In the field of politics his interests are specialized in the Russian transition between the late 1980s and the 1990s, and on strategic and military themes.
In 2008 he published The Lion’s Share. Dall’11 Settembre alla Scommessa di Bagdad” (The Lion’s Share: From September 11 to the Baghdad Gamble), in which the choices made by America after September 11 are the principal, but not the only, theme, as the book also deals with Israel and Europe, the UN and Russia, immigration and the Christian identity, as part of a wide-ranging study. In 2010 he published Il Tempo di Obama. Diario di un Inizio: Il Primo Anno (Obama’s Time. The Diary of a Beginning: the First Year), which is a synthesis of complex themes and events between the two opposed poles of an economy shocked by the financial crisis and weakened by the growth of debt, and a war, too often forgotten, in Afghanistan, in which men die according to new rules of engagement, but still in the same ancient ways, and with all the pain of those old days.His last book on American politics is Il nuovo sogno americano e la reazione (The new American Dream and the reaction) (2018), where the Trump presidency gets an unprecedented definition, in a book that with groundbreaking quality is a denunciation of the bromides prevaliling on American politics and American society.