Category: Access

In short, in the professional view of a gossip columnist on an evening paper, it was bizarre that the tug of war over Second Nature – a difficult book by an obscure author brought out by a small publisher – should attract public notice.  And the truth is, it was those who so improbably saw the obscure author crying out de profundis as a threat to themselves and their own departmental peace of mind who made the ensuing imbroglio what it was.  Thus, in the Observer, ancient Anthony Burgess had been given half a page to deal with four centenary...

Apart from the indomitable Madame Defarge, all I remember about the famous novel by Dickens is that there are two cities in it. Those cities, London and Paris, were evidently symbols for the author, not merely geographic or historical entities.  And so, following his example, I offer the reader a tale of two obituaries – newspaper articles about my father, who died last month – one written in London and published in the Daily Telegraph, the other written in New York and published in the New York Times. “Lev Navrozov, who has died aged 88, was a Russian author, historian,...

The other day I came across a book that was being advertized on Amazon, and it was called Christ’s Ventriloquists.  The blurb said it was “a work of investigative history” and the author described himself as an “investigative historian.”  Now, at the risk of giving the reader apoplexy, I want to quote from this blurb. The book, burbles the blurb, “documents and describes Christianity’s creation event, which occurred in Antioch 20 years after Jesus had been crucified in Jerusalem for sedition against Roman rule. At this event, Paul broke away from the Jewish sect that Jesus had begun, and he...

“Well, where is the getting down to the nitty-gritty then, eh?  The bedroom stuff you promised us? ” What I want the reader to glean from the preceding, anticipating some of my yet stranger claims, is that the Pasternak family had been split from the beginning.  The female line, issuing from the mother, produced Boris and Josephine.  Alexander and Lydia took after the father. When it comes to genetic roulette, a special deity protects the integrity of the big loser.  Rosalia gambled away music, but ended up with a devoted husband.  Boris staked his all on being like everyone else,...

  Lev Navrozov, my father, died last night.  The Orthodox priest who came to the hospice to administer the last rites could not do so, as one must repent one’s sins and the dying man was unconscious, but truth to tell, my father had no sins to confess.  He had lived his whole life in a kind of autistic cell of the mind, as close to monastic confinement as the profane world has to offer to the congenital intellectual whose brain is, or ought to be, his sole active organ. There was a Russian science fiction novel of the 1920’s...