The Varnished Culture's Thumbnail Reviews
Regularly added bite-sized reviews about Literature, Art, Music & Film.
Voltaire said the secret of being boring is to say everything.
We do not wish to say everything or see everything; life, though long is too short for that.
We hope you take these little syntheses in the spirit of shared enthusiasm.
Mephisto
(Klaus Mann)
Haughty toad sucks up to artsy-nazis to progress in the theatre; his Faustian bargain gets him more than expected.
It’s not hard to see why the estate of Gustaf Gründgens, the actor whose role as Mephistopheles bewitched that drama-lover Goering, sought to have the book banned by a German constitutional Court (in the old days they would simply have lobbed it on the bonfire).
One swell show
Major Barbara
(George Bernard Shaw)
A scream: armaments manufacturer Andrew Undershaft wants a successor; his bible-walloping daughter concludes it is better to take money from the devil for good use than leave it with him.
Very rude about the Salvation Army and worth re-consideration in these times of ‘clean charity’ (not to mention boycott, divestment and sanctions).
“The Booths are not amused…”
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The Life of Johnson
(James Boswell)
Incomparable biography (or stalker’s notes) of the great Tory grump Dr Samuel Johnson, packed with wit and wisdom.
My favourite vignette: Johnson speaks of one of Boswell’s Scottish acquaintances who affects a savage, Rousseau-like disdain for civilised order: “if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.”
‘A defect in his nervous system…’ (Painting of the Good Doctor by Reynolds)
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The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
(dir. Martin Ritt) (1965)
Agent Alec Leamas returns from Berlin, defeated and discouraged, and Control gives him a project: go back and set up his adversary for a big fall. So far, so good, but nothing is what it seems in grand espionage…
Great, grey, grim, cold war nasty. Dick Burton, et al, play for keeps with nary a hint of glamour.
‘No Aston Martin…you’re not a Bond girl, Claire’
The Embarrassment of Riches
(Simon Schama)
There’s the Amsterdam dutch
And the Zaandam dutch
And the Rotterdam dutch
And the God-damn dutch…
However, despite their slightly dodgy record in slave driving, tulip speculating, trade finance and robust colonization, this admiring and admirably crammed history of culture in the Dutch Golden Age is a delight. The ‘Burgemeester van Delft’ in Jan Steen’s painting on the cover is a dead ringer for Jeffrey Jones (Mr. Rooney in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off).
Continue Reading →The Long Goodbye
(Raymond Chandler)
I shaved and made some coffee and then parked on the settee to start reading this thing and then I got up and went back to the bathroom and stripped off my tie and shirt and sloshed cold water in my face with both hands and then went on reading and then fixed some more coffee and cooled it down with a slug of scotch and then I went out on the back porch and smoked a cigarette and that’s more or less where I got to.
Human Accomplishment
(Charles Murray)
A subversive book which purports to rank the top 20 men and women (mostly men) in the arts and sciences on the basis of historiometry.
Awash with Bell curves, Lotka curves, and arbitrary methodology, it fascinates but does not convince: one imagines oneself drawing a silly graph on the blackboard and quoting J. Evans Pritchard.
Photo of Charles Murray by Gage Skidmore
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The Minoans
( by J. Lesley Fitton)
For over 40 years Sir Arthur Evans had a patent on “Minoan” civilisation on Crete and tended to make it up as he went, albeit subconsciously.
This rather sober book puts the pots and pans and ‘restored’ frescoes in a slightly less romantic context.
The Lost One – A life of Peter Lorre
(Stephen Youngkin)
Standard, almost obsessively detailed reference book on the whispering menace.
Peter (born: Lazlo Loewenstein) was perfect in the film roles of the 1930s and 1940s, the smartest person in the room but always with a touch of sadness.
Peter gets to stroll the green lanes of Paradise for his work in M, Mad Love, Crime and Punishment, Strange Cargo, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca The Beast with Five Fingers, The Mask of Dimitrios, and Beat the Devil. He gets censured for taking work away from actors of certain nations and ethnicities, e.g., Japanese (the Mr Moto films), Chinese (They Met in Bombay, where his slimy ship’s captain declares, “I love money…I’ll do anything for money…heh heh…anything“) ‘Mexican’ (Secret Agent), Russian (Crime and Punishment), Dutch (The Mask of Dimitrios) and Irish (although we doubt the authenticity of that last one, from Beat the Devil, where Peter keeps insisting his name’s ‘O’Hara’ – a likely story).
“NOW are you impressed with me?”
Darkness at Noon
(Arthur Koestler)
Koestler, like Solzhenitsyn, managed to humanise the Gulag and here he almost manages to explain the insanity of the Great Terror in this short but brilliant novel, in which a now discarded architect of the revolution decides to abandon his duty not to perish. This writer has had a somewhat chequered past, but with this book he desreves substantial absolution.
