Category: Access

Everybody knows, however vaguely, that just before World War I, during his years in Vienna, Adolf Hitler made his living as a painter.  In Mein Kampf he recalled his hopes of attaining at least national renown, holding the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts responsible for eventually dashing them by denying him admission.  It is likewise remembered that the Viennese cafes where the epoch’s leading artists habitually gathered were frequented by the future dictator with a view to what today would be called networking.  In 1937, pictures by some of those artists were famously held up to ridicule in the Exhibition...

Some six months ago, at the end of March, I wrote here about the sensational case of the Ukrainian Joan of Arc, Nadezhda Savchenko – then in captivity in Moscow and undergoing a farce of a trial – who has since been exchanged for some Russian prisoners of the undeclared war and is now in Kiev.  Now, it may be that Savchenko is not the Ukrainian Joan of Arc, and that in reality she’s a war criminal, a madwoman, a villainess, a CIA agent, or even a Russian police provocateur; none of that matters in the least for making sense...

  I was scrolling through news headlines the other day, marvelling lazily at the lengths to which journalists will go to draw attention to their and other people’s philistine twaddle, when a story title caught my eye.  “Syrian women liberated from ISIS are burning their burqas,” it went. “What does that tell us?”  Naturally, I didn’t read on.  I knew the answer to the journalist’s rhetorical question long before she was born. When Stalin died in 1953, Russia’s entire population–statistically speaking, for there are a few notable exceptions on record went into a paroxysm of genuine, profound and unrehearsed grief,...

On a lighter note – it’s the middle of August, after all, and I ought to supply the longsuffering reader with something amusing for a Wednesday afternoon in the chaise-longue – here is a story written by Anton Chekhov in 1880, which my son and I have translated.  We had a laugh doing it, and are particularly proud of having found a plausibly English-sounding name for the protagonist’s estate, “Allcakes, nr. Eaten.” At first glance, this is pure slapstick.  It has, however, a darker side, as the part rationalist, part mystical banalities spewed forth by Basil Semiparticular – part Archie...

This is my forty-eighth post in this space–a panoply variegated enough for a whole Well-Tempered Clavier of distempered musings – and some of my readers may have noted that not once did I review or commend a book.  This is because the industry that produces books, which were once significant events, each with a claim to absolute uniqueness or at the very least to qualified originality, now functions like the writer of Melania Trump’s address to the Republican convention.  Plagiarism long ago ceased to be an intellectual crime, yet it remained a niche product, like tales of the supernatural or...