Category: Access

Replying last week to a thoughtful reader’s question, I wrote some nasty things about a hierarch of the Russian Church. Basically, I said the gentleman was a bad egg. Looking back at that exchange, all sorts of thoughts run through my mind, some more conciliatory than others. The curate’s egg – forgive me for repeating a 1895 story from Punch that everyone must know by now – may have been bad, but the polite curate said to the bishop who was giving him lunch that it was good in parts. Isn’t just about every human being on earth a curate’s...

A fascinating document is circulating in cyberspace. As it is in my mother tongue, there’s little point in directing my readers to a specific link, but those among them who read Russian can easily find it by using Yandex or any other search engine that accepts Cyrillic. The author’s name is Sergei Grigoryants. I had already left Russia when, in 1975, the dissident was arrested by the KGB and sentenced to five years in prison for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” under Article 70 of the Khrushchev-era Soviet Penal Code which took up where Article 58 of the Stalin-era Penal Code...

In the commotion, here and elsewhere, caused by my “Putin’s Hitler” last month, some words of doubt got misplaced – chiefly I mean readers questioning my contention, with which I had prefaced this post a week earlier, that Russia’s got money enough to burn, to say nothing of buying Crimea, if not Kiev.  I admit to certain capriciousness in my choice of Exhibit A, namely, a bill for 107,524 Euros paid by a party of young Russians lunching at a seaside restaurant in France; in the past few weeks, however, somewhat less fanciful proof has been adduced, and this I...

Two ladies, long past the first bloom of youth and recently arrived in what Russian wits call the Age of Balzac, are scrutinizing the map of Palermo in the bar on the ground floor of my apartment building. They turn the map this way and that, like two army recruits conspiring to desert in the middle of a dense and inhospitable forest supposedly traversed by a national frontier, and from the air of anxious isolation about them I gather they are American tourists. The bar’s proprietor, Carmelo, is enthroned at the cash register not two feet away.  Nothing would be...

  In English we signal everyman randomness by speaking of Tom, Dick, and Harry, with the French it’s “Pierre, Paul or Jacques,” while the equally boring Russians employ the common surnames “Ivanov, Petrov, Sidorov.”  But when the Italians, God bless their intractable little souls, want to do the same, they speak of “Tizio, Caio e Sempronio,” that is to say, Titus, Gaius, and Sempronius.  Just imagine how that would trip off the tongue:  “If he thinks I’m gonna let every Titus, Gaius, and Sempronius use the new lawnmower, he’s got another thing coming.” When I first came to Palermo some...

If I were asked to devise a novel “ontological proof” of God’s existence, in the tradition of St. Anselm and the rest of that crowd, I would probably begin by pointing out the difference between the price of a yard of cashmere tweed and a yard of blue denim.  Hierarchies exist and, despite society’s attempts to erode or invert them, are demonstrable and immutable, which suggests that some kind of apogee of the natural order of things must exist in its turn. Though our society seeks to level the field, so that a fur must now be qualified as “real”...

  We later divorced – among other reasons, because I did not deserve her – but the American woman to whom I was married at the time had certain peculiarities of character, and it was not until many years later that the visitor whom she had entertained at dinner recounted the episode to me in vivid detail. We were living in Florence then, a town I loathed and still do, renting the piano nobile of the Palazzo Corsini at the Prato – a cavernous, draughty, forbidding place, illuminated but dimly by Guido Reni’s portrait of a Corsini cardinal who would...

  Why didn’t Putin and his cronies simply buy Crimea from Ukraine – at ten cents an acre, like the Americans once bought Alaska from Alexander II of Russia – rather than launch a clumsy and noisy guerrilla war whose public relations outcome was predictable at the outset? The answer, I believe – concealed, camouflaged and biding its time – lies thousands of miles away, in the desert sands of the Middle East. I have been saying that “Muslim” terrorism is a Russian secret services canard – and, to the small extent their self-serving aims are congruent, that of the...

An Italian friend has just been to St. Tropez, which of course does little to recommend him as a vacationer of any great discernment, seeing as here in Sicily the prickly pear is now in season and you can have your fill of the divine fruit from a street vendor, who peels it while you wait, for about $1 American.  But anyway, tastes are tastes, as the Italians are the first to say. My friend brought back a curious souvenir of the famous watering hole, Nikki Beach, where one balmy afternoon he went to have lunch, and it occurred to...