The essays, reviews and articles here have a coherence I imagine, rather than claim, for them. A coherence of pleasure maybe, of curiosity, of alarm sometimes at our disarray. There’s no special picture of my making. I look at the interviews and only see in retrospect that in most cases the subject’s life spanned the best part of the twentieth century: Norman Lewis, witnessing the Asturian miners’ gunfire that precursed the Spanish Civil War; Eric Ambler in Manchester Square, viewing the upward curve of fascism; Lydia Chukovskaya, without whom there would be less of Akhmatova’s poetry, seeing the reality of Stalin’s purges.
I notice only now too a fixation with writers, mainly novelists. Even when I have written about non-writers – a neuroscientist, musicians – it was probably because they seemed to possess a literary sensibility, a reaching for the persuasion of sentences. Often the writers in question are forgotten. If there’s a connection between them, it may be that they represent a style shunned for at least a couple of decades, a style married to its meaning, a style both for itself and for the reader.
If I dissent from style for its own sake, as being a sort of vanity, I also dissent from the view that the world is ending, or changing fundamentally, especially since 9/11 and its sequels. Both are vanities. Civilisations are always threatened. Even more so, our fragility is vital to us, being what makes us human. Yet conversely I believe the world is still more various, more encrusted with future discoveries, than our normative outlook suggests. And whether that conformist tendency eases or not, the world is still best perfected, or made legible, through the metaphor of writing about it.
Because the journalistic racket is itinerant, the story strays. I have included a few excursions that illustrate the unplanned process of finding things to write about. None of the subjects, bar one, was anybody else’s idea. I agree that that doesn’t excuse their appearance.
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