Author: Andrei Navrozov

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6 Jun, 2018

Wednesday’s Child: Crying Wolfe

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If one were to cut open, the way one saws through a tree trunk, the literary career of Tom Wolfe, in the circles revealed therein one could read the entire history – or, more to the point, the whole tragedy – of what happened to the press in America in the twentieth century.  As the writer passed away last month, I want to say a couple of things about him which the gentle reader is unlikely to find in the numerous obituaries. In 1966, after a lengthy struggle, New York’s Herald Tribune – by then the only remaining highbrow competitor...

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30 May, 2018

Wednesday’s Child: Satan in the Details

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This is an old story – exactly two years old, to be exact – but I completely missed it when it was unfolding, and something tells me the gentle reader was likewise napping even as mischievous Pan was sounding his pipes. In June 2016 the Alps played host to a variety of dignitaries, including Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Francois Hollande, and Italy’s Matteo Renzi, at the opening ceremony for the $10 billion St. Gotthard tunnel, at 57 kilometers through solid rock the world’s longest and most ambitious. This six-hour-long theatrical spectacle had been choreographed by a German called Volker Hesse,...

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23 May, 2018

Wednesday’s Child: Question of the Century

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I had intended to stay out of politics for a while, what with the Sicilian peach season in full swing and all the rest of nature’s palliatives to hand, but then it occurred to me that unless I have my say on this particular subject, nobody in the whole wide world will.  It’s really the question of the century, as far as I’m concerned, and consequently I find few things more astonishing than the unbroken silence surrounding it.

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16 May, 2018

Wednesday’s Child: This Portside of Paradise

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When a Negroni cocktail is properly made, it is just the thing to drink sitting in the shade on a sunny day.  But when the humble Negroni is made with Punt e Mes instead of ordinary red vermouth, it is more than the cocktail you drink in the shade on a sunny day, it is how you set sail for paradise.

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3 May, 2018

Wednesday’s Child: Brownlow’s Razor, Part Two

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In short, something like a late Romantic.  Had Pasternak been born in England, he would now be remembered as the culmination of Romanticism, a poet taking to modern extreme that “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” which, famously, Wordsworth mentions in the preface to Lyrical Ballads.  And politics, it would seem, had as little to do with any of this as automobile manufacturing or Olympic sports. Yet this was the same poet who, aged 41 in 1931, published an autobiography entitled Okhrannaya gramota, its title usually, and not incorrectly, translated into English as Safe Conduct.  In speaking of a man who,...

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25 Apr, 2018

Wednesday’s Child: Brownlow’s Razor, Part One

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Frank Brownlow’s post of a few days ago has made me want to continue the discussion it began, but the truth is, it ain’t simple.  I’m at a disadvantage, because Dr. Brownlow’s is an eagle’s eye view of the paradox of culture under totalitarianism, whereas what I want to respond with is a worm’s eye view of the underlying evidentiary base

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17 Apr, 2018

Wednesday’s Child: The Artist at 60

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This is essentially a letter from Munich, where my wife and I flew last week – I to celebrate the composer Vladimir Genin’s sixtieth birthday, Olga to take part in a grosse Jubiläumskonzert in honor of the occasion. This took place on Sunday evening in Munich’s Gasteig, incongruously – for anyone familiar with Genin’s music – a modernist monstrosity along the lines of London’s Barbican and the new Seine Musicale in Paris.

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12 Apr, 2018

Wednesday’s Child: Letter from London

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They say that truth will always out in the end, but the truth is that awls can be hidden in sackcloth for generations.  Take the ordinary umbrella – the kind without a poisoned tip – and tell me honestly if a more ineffectual contraption has ever existed; and yet no wife, mother, or grandmother ever neglects to remind the man of the house to avail himself of one whenever it looks like rain.  In London, of course, it always does. Rain has a mind of its own, which is called wind, and consequently, however large the umbrella, within ten minutes...

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4 Apr, 2018

Wednesday’s Child: Voters in Peril

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I met Badri Patarkatsishvili once, in a nightclub where I was taken by Boris Berezovsky.  With Berezovsky himself I’d had a cordial relationship going back to the first days of his flight to Britain.  Sasha Litvinenko I also met once, at the famous press conference he gave in London about his book, banned in Russia in 2003 and since 2015 on the Federal Roster of Extremist Materials