Richard Wollheim

One snowy night in the early months of 1945, we were dining in the basement of a bombed-out house in one of those neat workers’suburbs of which the Dutch were proud. ‘We’ were the ten or so officers on the Head-quarters of 214 Infantry Brigade. For protection against the fierce cold, we had an anthracite stove, which smoked, and large tumblers of Dutch gin. We had been out of the line for an unprecedented ten days, and the Brigadier was in a more relaxed mood than we had seen since the last days of training in Kent the previous summer. He said that we must promise him something. We had been through a lot together. ‘My word,’ he said, and he chuckled. When the war was over, we might start to think of these as great days of our lives. ‘I want you never to forget that war is the filthiest, the most disgusting, thing man has invented.’

J.-B. Pontalis is a Parisian intellectual de pur sang. Born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family, he was brought up in Neuilly, and, as a child, spent long summers at a family house in Cabourg, Proust’s Balbec. He studied philosophy under Sartre, and taught it for some years. He entered psychoanalysis under the aegis of Lacan, and having weaned himself from that unfortunate affiliation, is now one of the leading figures in the French psychoanalytic world. He was on the editorial board of Les Temps modernes, and he founded and now runs La Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse. He is part of the hierarchy of Gallimard, which is as much an academy as a publishing house. He has always had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, and he seems never to have let his experience of life be restricted by the constraints of employment or profession. He has always, as he puts it, ‘tried to diversify’.

Written in a strong, clear, slightly salty style, carrying effortlessly a great deal of information, much of it new, and illustrated so profusely that at every turn the narrative seems to play itself out before our eyes, the first volume of John Richardson’s long-awaited Life of Picasso will leave its readers waiting impatiently for Volume Two. Long may it go on. Meanwhile it is a special kind of pleasure to be able to praise the book of an old and close friend, and be confident that the praise has nothing to do with the friendship.

In the late afternoon of Wednesday, 28 June, a television channel rang me. Would I say a few words on their news programme about Freddie Ayer? It was the first I heard of his death. Then the Independent, for which I had written an obituary a year before, asked me if I would write 600 words for their front page. Then another television channel rang. Freddie’s death was about to become, I could see, a media event.

Professor Bernard Lewis enjoys a worldwide reputation as a scholar of Near-Eastern history, and in his most recent work, Semites and Anti-Semites, he has chosen to concentrate his formidable powers of analysis, and a massive accumulation of fact, upon a relatively restricted topic, which nevertheless raises large questions of historical and political understanding. The book deals with the widespread adoption within the Arab nation-states of the classical anti-semitic rhetoric that has so consistently fouled Christian civilisation. The quotations Lewis has retrieved from journals of standing, indeed from writers who lay claim to respectability, make chilling reading. They depress our estimate of human nature.