For Those Who Don’t Know

Julian Bell: Van Gogh’s Letters, 5 November 2009

Vincent van Gogh: The Letters 
edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker, translated by Michael Hoyle et al.
Thames and Hudson, 2180 pp., £395, October 2009, 978 0 500 23865 3
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... uncertainly forward out of the doors of the church; towards the end, he was inclining towards Tolstoy’s doctrine of a purely immanent kingdom of God. But in a certain sense, his existential thrashing about within the contradictions he had entered in 1880 was quite as religious as anything that had gone on before. The more so because, all the while, a ...

Oh God, what have we done?

Jackson Lears: The Strange Career of Robert Oppenheimer, 20 December 2012

Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer 
by Ray Monk.
Cape, 818 pp., £30, November 2012, 978 0 224 06262 6
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... the Manhattan Project reached its successful conclusion.) When he and Edsall debated the merits of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Oppenheimer chose Dostoevsky, saying ‘he gets to the soul and torment of man.’ He told Edsall that ‘the kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but maintains a ...

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

... won’t have a book before Christmas. But I can see you wouldn’t be convinced by anybody, not Leo Tolstoy himself, to delay the book.’ ‘No, we couldn’t. It’s gone too far and he’s had too many chances. We’re publishing the book and this is the book we want to publish.’ Geoffrey Robertson was then hired by Julian to check the ...

Germs: A Memoir

Richard Wollheim, 15 April 2004

... person? Did he really belong to the town, or to the country? Would he have been more at home in Tolstoy or in Turgenev? What painter could have done justice to his appearance? How did he look at his best? On all these matters conflicting views were expressed, and, when it came to the last question, a dry, shrill voice, coming from a young man, rose to a ...