A neighbor recommended an Off-Broadway play: Douglas Lackey’s Hans Litten: The Jew Who Cross-Examined Hitler. We saw it last Saturday. In one memorable scene, concentration camp prisoners are ordered to sing the Horst Wessel Nazi anthem”Die Fahne hoch,” ( “Raise the Flag”), in celebration of Hitler’s birthday. Instead, Litten leads them in the defiant German folk song “Die Gedanken sind…
Clifford Witting’s Measure for Murder (1941) belongs to that strand of Golden Age crime fiction whose pleasures lie as much in social observation as in puzzle-solving. One of the enduring appeals of the genre is the glimpse it can provide into an England now almost unrecognisable, yet still just within living memory. Here that includes the novelty of car ownership,…
What if the man you’re rooting for in a wartime darkly comic thriller is also a serial killer? In Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper (1943), Donald Henderson gives us just that: a shabby, lonely public-school man with a bleak past, a murderer burdened by a morbid wish to be caught. (You can read the novel here.) One aspect of the…
All this week The Daily Poem from The Paris Review has featured work by Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. In other words, it is featuring the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935). See the sidebar below for the explanation from the Review. On Tuesday, there were three sonnets by Álvaro de Campos. Here’s one of them:…
One of the pleasures of events like the #1952Club is the chance to stumble across something unexpected and delightful – and A Perch in Paradise by Margaret Bullard is exactly that. Why this deliciously wicked novel has not been reissued by one of those publishing houses that specialize in forgotten gems by women is a mystery. Someone needs to get…
“We were young and we were keen; Europe was in flames, and we were ready for whatever came.” “I used to think that war would make one braver, harder—but instead, it only makes one tired. The glamour of it wears off quickly when you’re pulling bodies from the wreckage.” Train to Nowhere by Anita Leslie Anita Leslie’s Train to Nowhere…
Hope I’m not jumping the gun here but the #1940Club starts next week and I’ve been gearing up and getting ready. The idea is simple. It’s a fun event with no pressure because you can choose anything from the year and read as much or as little as suits you. You can share on your blogs, Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, in…
Norman Pearson returned towards the end of January, after an absence in Spain and Portugal, bearing two bananas, two oranges and a pineapple. The bananas and oranges were simple, Hilda and I had one each. Apart from a few green apples and some berries in Cornwall, it was the first fruit that we had tasted for two years. It seemed…
Researching Marienbad and the Savoy led me to Erika Mann and all the gossip, scandal, politics, and drama of her family. I wanted to read her account of life in pre-war Germany The Lights Go Down in part of my preparation for the 1940 Club and here. I couldn’t track down a copy so I read School for Barbarians: Education…
In Our Flag Stays Red (1948) Phil Piratin – the Communist Party MP for Mile End – wrote an account of the 1940 occupation of the Savoy Hotel. This is just one of the many stories I came across in the research for the Marienbad – my post about Fritz Stingl and his escape from Czechoslovakia in 1939. Fritz was…
Every Christmas growing up my family received a greeting card from the Stingl family. I knew that my grandmother, mother, and aunt had known Fritz Stingl in the 1930s. He was Czech and he had arrived at Croydon airport as a refugee and been turned back even though they were at the barrier waiting to sponsor him. And then there…
The Year Begins in October Armistead Maupin based his vignettes of gay life in 1970s San Francisco – Tales of the City – on Jan Struther’s Mrs. Miniver (1939). They first appeared in a long-running serial in the San Francisco Chronicle. Instinctively I wanted to write a gay male Mrs Miniver, the minutiae of gay life with Michael Tolliver as…
Hands down, this is the best book I’ve read all year: All For Nothing by Walter Kempowski. It’s the bitter winter of 1945. An odd assortment of people lives in the Georgenhof – a small neglected estate in East Prussia. Eberhard von Globig is a Sonderführer, a special officer in the German army away in Italy confiscating wine and olive…
I did, in the first weeks of the war, before I got my commission, suffer severely from ‘evacuees’.– Evelyn Waugh in a preface to Put Out More Flags complaining about evacuees much as he might have done about gout or rising damp. Evelyn Waugh is often at his most entertaining when he is at his most disagreeable. Reading Waugh – and…
“What are you doing in the wardrobe?” “Narnia business” C.S.”Jack” Lewis spent childhood years in a house in Belfast where he and his brother immersed themselves in myths and legends. They spent wet afternoons sitting inside an old and cavernous wardrobe where they told each other tales of a magical kingdom of talking animals. The world of Narnia was rooted…