Category: Wednesday’s Child

What do I know about Jehovah’s Witnesses?  Nothing, naturally, as do most of my readers, I suspect. 

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,...

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...

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

Like a young father who can’t keep himself from telling everyone it’s a boy, or – to put a current events spin on it – like Western politicians who have been shown that the arms control agreements they negotiated were unverifiable and never observed by the other side, I’m still reeling from the news I shared here last week.

I wrote for Tom Fleming for the better part of thirty years.  In all that time, here as elsewhere, I never asked my editor to bless a sketch or an essay that raised the spectre of self-promotion, or for that matter of any other kind of base interest or material gain.  One might almost think I was biding my time, waiting for the right moment to pounce on my readers.  Well, I’m afraid I have some bad news, ladies and gentlemen. That moment has come.

To begin with I ought to reassure the gentle reader that any resemblance between the title of this post and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is purely coincidental, though a literary charlatan in the audience may well argue that, like the pretentious novel, my post “deals with issues of loss, subjectivity, and the problem of perception.”