Painterly ultra-realism
This is a painting by the Ukrainian painter Vladimir Orlovsky which I came across in Adam Tooze’s terrific blog. I looked hard at it, unable to believe that it isn’t a photograph. It’s not.
Quote of the Day
“I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.”
- Groucho Marx
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Mozart | Piano Concerto No 21 in C major, K 467. | II. Andante Herbert von Karajan and (I guess) the Berliner Phil.
Funny how often this is now called the “Elvira Madigan” because of its use in the film.
Audio quality of the recording is abysmal I’m afraid. Apologies.
Long Read of the Day
Watching the detectives
Andrew Brown is a friend of mine, an experienced journalist and a bloody good writer. (One of his books won the Orwell Prize.) He also has a Substack, which I follow. Recently, he stumbled on some of his notebooks when, 40 years ago, he was shadowing London police officers as research for a book. This is an excerpt from one of them.
The superintendent’s face was ruddy and his fingers sunburned. He looked like an honest Labour politician of the ‘45 vintage, marked by good living well appreciated – say Jim Callaghan, but with George Brown’s eyebrows. I had been following the work at his station for a month or two and he had decided I could be trusted, a little bit. So he invited me to drink whisky with him in his office one afternoon. There was a desk, of course, chairs for visitors, a filing cabinet and display a cabinet full of gardening trophies; on top of that were two carved wooden hands, one with one finger upraised; the other with two fingers raised, not in a sign of peace.
He wanted to teach me how policing worked…
Read on.
I found it compelling. Hope you do too.
So many books, so little time
Fabers sent me a proof copy of Peter’s book last year and somehow it got lost in the chaotic piles in my study. I retrieved it yesterday and started to read — and am finding it unputdownable. It’s about an extraordinary Briton, Sefton Delmer, who was a gifted propagandist working for the British during the Second World War. It’s a good story, very well told by an author who knows a lot about propaganda. Such a relief to have found it at last.
My commonplace booklet
This comes from the remarkable material currently being published by the Economist drawn from archives of the magazine’s coverage of the final year of WW2 in Europe. The excerpt below came from one of their correspondents who was on a Bavarian country road in June down which thousands of defeated German troops and their officers were marching towards wherever they were to be incarcerated.
”Somewhere by the side of the road a man in the striped uniform of the concentration camp is trudging slowly home. A short time ago he was stopped by an SS officer, travelling with his orderly in a car. A sharp exchange of words and threats accompanied by violent gesticulation takes place. As an American jeep approaches the quarrel stops, and the SS officer’s car moves off. The ex-inmate of the concentration camp explains with some pride that he was an official of the Social Democratic party at Breslau. Yes, it is true. SS men occasionally bully people like this on the roads.”
The man heading to Breslau (now Wroclaw, in Poland) faced an uncertain fate under Russian occupation. Until he was “dragged away to the concentration camp”, we wrote, “he had been a ‘Social-Fascist’ in the eyes of local Communists.”
”At the other side of the road, a tall, thin woman tries to explain something in broken English to two American officers. In her confused, unintelligible story two words keep on recurring: Gas-kammer. It turns out that seven years ago her child was classified by a Nazi doctor as mentally defective. The family doctor disagreed with the diagnosis, but his opinion was ignored. In accordance with the rules of ‘racial hygiene’ the child would have to be thrown into a gas-chamber, the Nazi version of the Tarpeian rock. The mother hid the child in a remote place, some two hundred kilometres away. The last time she saw the child it was nearly starving. Could she now get a permit from the Military Government to go and fetch her child?”
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