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Recent Posts
- How Russians protested in August 1968 when Soviet Russia invaded Czechoslovakia
- Street Life and Morals — an interview with Lesley Chamberlain
- When I shook Gorbachev’s hand
- On a Novel by John Barth and a harrowing illegal abortion scene: think again ‘pro-lifers’!
- Ghislaine Maxwell: J’ACCUSE!
- Russia as a Eurasian Power — the history
- Russia in my lifetime : a tragic story Central Moscow in April 1992 was a jumble sale. Trestle tables obstructed the pavements, old counterpanes covered them. Mostly older people, mostly women, displayed trinkets for sale: a cup, a few beads, a spare tin. Outside the Bolshoi Theatre sheet music – bound conductors’ scores even– waited for a chance buyer. They were like cultural treasure turned out of safe-keeping by a marauding army. Over in Sokolniki park at the Sunday market Red Army uniforms were going for a song. The entire Soviet past was ridiculed. It made me feel uncomfortable. I cast my mind back twenty years earlier to my first contact with Communist Russia, when a planeload of young Western visitors who should have known better applauded when we took off for home again. Mostly they didn’t like the food. In Nizhny Novgorod I knew a woman who had been an Intourist travel guide. She knew her lines by heart. ‘You tell the visitor so much they don’t need to ask questions. Isn’t that right, Lesley?’ Galya had a nervous breakdown when both her technique and her beloved knowledge of Soviet history and culture were made redundant overnight. The Cold War, and its end, were a painful business.
- The Old Men at the Zoo: Novelist Angus Wilson (1913-1991) on the Riot of post-war Britain
- A Meeting with Isaiah Berlin and a few reflections on his quarrel with Roger Scruton
- A Meeting with Isaiah Berlin and a few reflections on his quarrel with Roger Scruton
- From Weimar to Washington: The Collapse of the House of Bourgeois Ideas – Part 1
- How Tolstoy named an adulterer — the great writer 110 years on
- The Crown The Making of A National Epic
- The Agonies of George Steiner
- Roger Scruton – A Personal Memoir
- A giant step, but for whom?
- Le Carre’s Agent in a New Field
- A European View of Jeremy Corbyn
- Letter to Nietzsche
- Van Gogh in Kent: the inspiration he took forward from his days in England
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Category Archives: Britain Today
The Crown The Making of A National Epic
Towards the end of the first episode of Peter Morgan’s masterpiece The Crown, a dying George VI is given a present by the local people. In the drawing room at Sandringham, the Norfolk country estate where the British Royal family … Continue reading
Posted in Brexit, Britain Today, British politics, Current Affairs, english literature, Theatre, Writing
Tagged Brexit, British society, The Crown
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Roger Scruton – A Personal Memoir
Roger Scruton – A Personal Memoir Roger Scruton, the foremost English conservative of his generation, was a brilliant man who would have wished to be a genius. This tension, and ambition, which he felt fiercely, kept him writing and publishing … Continue reading
Le Carre’s Agent in a New Field
What a genius John Le Carre has for turning out highly readable and perfectly plotted novels! Now into his eighties with Agent Running in The Field he shows no signs of flagging. It’s true there’s something old bufferish about the … Continue reading
Posted in Britain Today, Cold War, novels, Writing
Tagged books, Brexit, contemporary life, John le Carre
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A European View of Jeremy Corbyn
I don’t normally blog about politics but in the wake of the general election of December 2019 I can’t resist this. It’s the view of the liberal German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Boris Johnson couldn’t have had an easier opponent to … Continue reading
The End of the Gift of Language?
In November 2010 one of this country’s subtlest interpreters of French thought gave a lecture in the capital on Aristotle and his critics. Geoffrey Bennington’s rare London appearance was billed ‘Political Animals…’ but his actual topic was The Death of … Continue reading
Posted in American literature, Britain Today, French intellectuals, novels, postmodernism, Writing
Tagged Aldous Huxley, Aristotle, Bernhard Schlink, books, Brave New World, contemporary life, Criticism, Derrida, language, literature, Lyotard, Philip Roth, philosophy, The Human Stain, The Reader
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John Le Carré’s Legacy: Passion in Germany and the Maze of Betrayal
In possibly his last novel, A Legacy of Spies (2017) John le Carré, aged 86, has done what writers and artists long to do, not for their audiences but for the sake of their own soul. He’s found the perfect … Continue reading
Posted in Britain Today, Cold War, english literature, novels, Writing
Tagged books, John le Carre, literature, Novels, writing
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The Skripal Affair and the Problem of Russia
A few nights ago on the BBC the Russia expert Andrei Illarionov, once a Putin confederate and now at Washington’s Cato Institute, was asked about Britain’s best response to the latest attempt to murder Russian state enemies on British … Continue reading
The Sculptor, the Spy and a Moment of Political Sincerity
The story of how the highly distinguished art historian and former Cambridge Apostle Anthony Blunt was unmasked in 1979 as having been a spy for Soviet Russia, has a peculiar appeal for my generation and roundabout. I imagine John le … Continue reading
The Russian Revolution and British Society
The Russian Revolution set British society on fire from the moment in February 1917 when its first instalment happened. From the moment the tsar abdicated and Alexander Kerensky’s Provisional Government took over from the chic salons of Bloomsbury to … Continue reading
The Arc of Utopia in the anniversary year of Russia 1917
Not much enthusiasm has been directed towards the Russian Revolution in this year of its centenary, 2017. At least that’s the case in the British press. Before the fall of Communism in 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union … Continue reading
Lesley Chamberlain 