The Brooknerian

Rupert Christiansen in this week's Telegraph : For sheer sharpness and elegance of mind, I have never encountered anyone to match the art historian and novelist Anita Brookner. I used to sit next to her on a tedious committee otherwise stuffed with blowhard civil servants: the way she could cut through their pompous waffle with a single pithy point was awe-inspiring. 'Idiotic men!' she would mutter furiously under her breath when the meeting was over.  [She left the bulk of her estate to] Médecins Sans Frontières, the no-nonsense charity that sends doctors to war‑torn areas. There was nothing sentimental about Anita, but her kindness ran as deep as her intelligence.

Anita Brookner featured somewhat incongruously in the British media this weekend when details of her last will and testament were emblazoned across a page of the Mail on Sunday and here on the Mail Online site. No other papers picked up the story, though I think the Express may have run with it on the following day. Incongruous again. In fact it was thin enough to be a non-story. The main point seemed to be that she'd left the bulk of her estate to the medical charity Médecins sans Frontiéres. Quite why this might be of interest is anyone's guess. There's possibly an undercurrent in the reporting, given that the subject of foreign aid isn't particularly flavour of the month at either the Mail or the Express . Brookner's interest in MSF was already known, as an earlier Brooknerian post makes clear (see here ). The reason for her interest in the charity isn't clear. But should it be? Other details in the Mail article are in any case more salient: the r...

A measure of the addictiveness of an author is the quantity of legendary material that surrounds her. Dickens does not inspire the Dickensian life, nor Trollope the Trollopian. One doesn't long to be subject to a Bildungsroman , living in a world where everyone has a funny name*; nor to be a provincial clergyman or a British parliamentarian. But one follows yearningly the course set out by Brookner, odd and unique as it may prove. She is uncompromising: this is the life, and it is the only life to live. To Germany again, for she perversely visited small towns and cities in France and Germany, the more obscure the better. To Karlsruhe, to the Staatliche Kunsthalle, where I saw a Hans Baldung Grien exhibition... ...along with favourites from the permanent collection: this Temptation of St Anthony by Joos van Craesbeeck... ...and this Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Loose Living : The St Anthony , one of the most arresting paintings, is hidden away and uncelebrated. You ca...

Too often disappointing, sometimes one's reading truly works, in the way it worked in childhood. How often as an adult does one experience that? When I first read Hotel du Lac , at seventeen, one summer. When I read The Small House at Allington , another summer, in Rome. When I read Anthony Powell, tears smarting in my eyes in an Amsterdam hotel breakfast-room as I learned, via a throwaway remark, of poor Stringham's death. Rereading almost never matches up. Or else one identifies with new things. In Great Expectations I am cold now to the story of Pip's love for Estella. But I break down when Pip tells Magwitch, at the last, that his lost child lives and is now a lady. Or when old Pip returns to the forge to find Jo and Biddy and their own little son - and Pip sees himself: 'sitting on my own little stool looking at the fire, was - I again!' Guilty reading can be compulsive too. I'm halfway through May at 10 , Anthony Seldon's almost day-by-day account ...

My school librarian (I spent most lunchtimes in the school library), a Mrs Davies, very Welsh, was a literary woman. Gradually down the years one pieces together one's prehistory. She was over the moon when Graham Greene wrote what was to be his final novel, The Captain and the Enemy ; she even had a publisher's promotional poster, which she displayed in the library. This was in, I now learn, 1988. I saw The Captain and the Enemy in a charity shop, and was at once transported. I had to have it. Such discoveries are like reclaiming the lost past. The Captain and the Enemy concerns a conman. Who else does these plausible figures with such aplomb? Le Carré of course; Brookner has several too: an Ainsworth in Fraud , a Colonel in A Friend from England . An ersatz military moniker is often de rigueur . Greene's Captain arrives at the narrator's boarding school, claiming to have won him from his father in a game of backgammon. The boy follows the Captain to a fadin...

A curious anecdote, this, from the Chelsea Society (see here ) - reminding us, as ever, that so reclusive a figure as Brookner was in some sense doomed to be constructed by such stories (as she surely knew): A resident who was on greeting terms with the novelist, the late Anita Brookner recounts this very early morning exchange on a near-deserted summer King’s Road. Resident: ‘Good morning, Miss Brookner, and what an exceptionally bright and sunny morning it is.’ Anita Brookner: ‘Quite so. And passing Markham Square I heard a fox cough.’

I was writing this book during the last year or so before Britain's deluded, masochistic departure from the European Union. Julian Barnes, 'Author's Note', The Man in the Red Coat (2019) Not a few critics of The Man in the Red Coat have made good use of Barnes's afterword, in which he makes tentative links between the Parisian  fin de siècle world that is the book's topic and the troubled politics and discourses of today. Altogether, The Man in the Red Coat is something of a disappointment. Its art and literary criticism are second to none, and it is richly illustrated, but it is confusing book, with meanderings that mimic W. G. Sebald but without his unpredictability. I found it smelt a little too much of the lamp. I fear the red-coated Pozzi, whose Sargent portrait Dr Pozzi at Home , inspired Barnes's book, may simply not be very fascinating as a subject. Ah, but when was Julian Barnes writing? That's what perversely interests me. Was...