-
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
Archives
- August 2023
- October 2022
- September 2022
- July 2022
- April 2022
- March 2022
- November 2021
- August 2021
- January 2021
- November 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- November 2019
- March 2019
- February 2019
- August 2018
- July 2018
- March 2018
- November 2017
- September 2017
- August 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- July 2016
- June 2016
- April 2016
- February 2016
- January 2016
- December 2015
- October 2015
- September 2015
- August 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- April 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- December 2014
- November 2014
- October 2014
- September 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- December 2013
- September 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- September 2012
Categories
- 2019 election
- A Shoe Story
- A Shoe Story – my next book
- American literature
- Anyone's Game – my latest novel
- Arc of Utopia – my latest book
- Art History
- autobiography
- Brexit
- Britain Today
- British politics
- Cold War
- Current Affairs
- english literature
- Europe
- existentialism
- Film
- Food
- Frankfurt School
- French intellectuals
- French literature
- German Literature
- German press
- Girl in a Garden- my first novel
- History of Bourgeois Experience
- In the Communist Mirror
- In The Communist Mirror – my book 25 years old this year
- Iris Murdoch
- Literature in Translation
- Ministry of Darkness How Sergei Uvarov Created Conservative Modern Russia
- Music
- New York Intellectuals
- Nietzsche in Turin
- novels
- Philosophy and Philosophers
- postmodernism
- Pushkin
- Russia
- Russian Conservatism
- Russian Revolution 1917
- Street Life and Morals
- The Secret Artist A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud
- Theatre
- Things German
- Uncategorized
- Van Gogh in England
- which I published in 1990
- Who are you?
- Writing
-
Join 178 other subscribers
Category Archives: Britain Today
A German Idealist on Globalization – and what he might have to say to an anti-Brexiteer
Rüdiger Safranski is one of the best-known philosophers in contemporary Germany. Together with his many prizes, the highly rated television programme, Philosophisches Quartett, ‘The Philosophical Quarter’, he has presented with Peter Sloterdijk, since 2002, has secured his name. In … Continue reading
Adorno, the Frankfurt School and the Soul of Europe
No one who has read Theodore Adorno would have been surprised by last summer’s Charlie Hebdo cartoon when Amatrice, an Italian town otherwise known for its pasta sauce, suffered a fatal earthquake. The French magazine with its satirical pasta shapes … Continue reading
Tony Blair: Idealist, Liberal or just Confused?
People fell in love with Tony Blair when he was elected Labour Prime Minister in May 1997. Ten years later they hated him. Parliament had been lied to over the Iraq war. There never were convincing reasons to believe Iraqi … Continue reading
Posted in Britain Today, Current Affairs, Europe, Philosophy and Philosophers, Who are you?
Tagged contemporary life, News, philosophy, politics, tony blair, UK politics
Leave a comment
From Pasternak’s novel to David Lean’s film of Doctor Zhivago
Pasternak told an interviewer from abroad in 1960 that I wanted to record the past and to honor in Doctor Zhivago the beautiful and sensitive aspects of the Russia of those years. There will be no return of those days, … Continue reading
Posted in Britain Today, Cold War, Current Affairs, Film, Russia
Tagged Russian Literature
Leave a comment
Siegfried Kracauer’s idea of ‘Mass Ornament’
Mass society as its own ornament was how the German social critic Siegfried Kracauer understood the street life of the dying years of the Weimar Republic. You can find this clever idea which brings us right to the present day … Continue reading
A Conservative British Childhood Two Hundred Years Ago John Ruskin and his Parents
Ruskin born in February 1819 was five years old when his parents took him to visit the field of Waterloo. It was a moment in an heroic Tory childhood he might like to have remembered better. His autobiography Praeterita records his … Continue reading
Posted in Art History, Britain Today, Current Affairs, Europe, Who are you?
Tagged defining beauty, ruskin, waterloo, william morris
Leave a comment
Cold War Shakespeare
In the 1960s the Polish literary critic Jan Kott revolutionized approaches to Shakespeare. British directors Peter Hall and Peter Brook were so transfixed it might be said Kott made their careers. As a cycle of the first three of the … Continue reading
The Year to Come for a European-minded writer who lives in England
I’m a European-minded writer who lives in England and writes in English, which is my native tongue. I’m not monoglot. French, German, Russian, Italian and Spanish are all available to me, but I’ll never now make the step of trying … Continue reading
Art, Wealth and Contemporary London: On a Film by Joanna Hogg
Exhibition is a fierce exposé of art and wealth in contemporary London. It’s the third film by British photographer turned director Joanna Hogg and it might be described as puzzling, minimalist and arthouse by turns. Hogg works repeatedly, like the … Continue reading
Posted in Art History, Britain Today, Film, Who are you?, Writing
Tagged Art and Design, contemporary life, Criticism, film
Leave a comment
The German 1930s and the Future of Art: more from A Shoe Story
When Heidegger commented on van Gogh’s painting ‘The Shoes’ (aka ‘Boots with Laces’) fifty years, from 1886 to 1936, had passed, and what fifty years, in Europe! Van Gogh himself had expected the nineteenth century to go out with a … Continue reading
Lesley Chamberlain 