Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
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…
Continue Reading →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.
Continue Reading →The Trial
(by Franz Kafka) An offense to natural justice, this nightmare procedural (originally entitled ‘The Process’) has K finding all about how but nothing about why. Kafka’s famous novel interprets both the times and the inhumanity of the human condition.
Continue Reading →The Aeneid
Virgil - A Roman Representation.
(by Virgil) Iliad begat Aenid begat Commedia…Virgil links two classic works 2,000 years apart with a masterpiece of his own, wherein Aeneas goes to Rome and wreaks Trojan revenge on the successors of Attic Greece, with everyone satisfyingly getting what’s coming to them. Full of images and phrases resplendent either in English or in dodgy Latin. Thus Walter Pater (in Appreciations) “I am reading over again the Aeneid, certain verses of which I repeat to myself to satiety. There are phrases there which stay in one’s head, by which I find myself beset, as with those musical airs which are…
Continue Reading →Talleyrand
(by Duff Cooper) When told that those who fell in with Napoleon had “betrayed the cause of Europe”, Talleyrand replied that was “a question of dates”. A legendary survivor, his apparent inconsistency seems to have less to do with a lack of morals than with the exigencies of geopolitics. This elegant biography of the wily, oleaginous and adaptable diplomat-statesman, serving French Kings from Louis XVI to Louis-Philippe, was written by Duff Cooper, who knew a thing or two about difficult men (and women).
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