BIOGRAPHY

foundation had felt the influence of Dr Arnold’s Rugby, how much more agreeable still to think that Arthur Clough, once Arnold’s pet pupil (despite that ‘weakness in his ankles which prevented him from taking a prominent part in the games of the place’), should have been reduced to this menial role, conscientiously doing up brown paper parcels for Florence Nightingale. What fun Strachey had in drawing this malicious picture – and how one relished it. It was of course utterly inadequate. You couldn’t say Strachey was lying: not outright. There was always some evidence to justify his sneers. But Clough, as this admirable and judicious book makes clear, was really an unsuitable target for Bloomsbury’s mockery. He was after all the author of Amours de Voyage, an epistolary novel in verse which is so relaxed, accomplished, witty and dandyish that one might have expected Strachey to delight in it. Am I prepared to lay down my life for the British female? Really, who knows? One has bowed and talked, till, little by little, All the natural heat has escaped of the chivalrous spirit. Oh, one conformed, of course; but one doesn’t die for good manners … The novel, at once a love story and a travel book, is full of good things. The setting is Rome, in the last days of the short-lived Republic after the revolution of 1848, and a French army is advancing to restore the Pope. The narrator, Claude, warns his friend Eustace not to believe everything he reads in The Times: … although it was slightly in error When it proclaimed as a fact the Apollo was sold to a Yankee, You may believe when it tells you the French are at Civita Vecchia. The French advance comes closer. ‘Claude’s first intimation of battle is that in the Caffè Nuovo in the Via Condotti he cannot get milk for his coffee.’ So he goes out as a tourist to view the fighting. For some hours he watches and wonders, ‘but guessing is tiresome, very’. That is almost Stendhalian. So, ‘Weary of wondering, watching, and guessing, and gossiping idly’, he descends the Pincian, then After endeavouring idly to minister balm to the trembling Quinquagenarian fears of two lone British spinsters, Go to make sure of my dinner before the enemy enter. The man who could write like that, with such judgement and wit, did not deserve Strachey’s mockery. Fortunately, here now is Anthony Kenny to do justice to this remarkable poet and likeable man. This is a very good critical biography, and an admirable picture of the intellectual world of early Victorianism. To order this book at £xx, see order form on page xx

N IGEL J ONES

THE TORCH IS QUENCHED

K ARL K RAUS , A POCALYPTIC S ATIRIST : T HE P OST -W AR C RISIS ANDTHE R ISE OFTHE S WASTIKA

★By Edward Timms (Yale University Press 639pp £35)

T WENTYYEARSAGO , Edward Timms, a British academic, published a massive half-life of a figure little known to English readers, but familiar to the inhabitants of his native Mittel-Europa. Two decades on, Karl Kraus is still distinguished here by his obscurity, but Timms has completed his magnum opus – another huge and learned tome covering the remaining half of his hero’s life and turbulent times. Let me reassure Professor Timms at once that his titanic labours of love have not been in vain. In delineating Kraus’s world with such masterly care, he has illuminated a whole society – the lost culture of Central Europe in general, and its centre of excellence, Vienna, in particular. For Kraus was not just a hugely gifted, active and fertile author and journalist, he was the very

The British Academy British Academy lectures are freely open to the general public and everyone is welcome. The lectures take place at 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1 and begin at 5.30pm and will be followed by a reception at 6.30pm.

Autumn Lectures 2005

5.30pm, Friday 2 December 2005 Useful Knowledge Dame Marilyn Strathern, DBE, FBA University of Cambridge Isaiah Berlin Lecture

5.30pm, Tuesday 6 December 2005 What is Cornwall? Professor Charles Thomas, CBE, FBA Sir John Rhys Memorial Lecture

Further information and abstracts are available at www.britac.ac.uk/events Meetings Department, The British Academy 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1 Telephone:020 7969 5246 Fax:020 7969 5228 Email:lectures@britac.ac.uk

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006