Consumers of biography are familiar with the division between memoirs of the living or recently dead written by those who “knew” the subject more or less intimately, and the more objective or scholarly accounts produced by later generations.
“With the Greek civilisation beauty perished from the world. Never again has it been possible for man to believe that harmony is in fact the truth of all existence.â€
This elegantly-written work provides a splendid introduction to the Greeks of the classic period: how they thought, wrote, and organised their lives and loves. Although it dates from the 1890s, there is very little about it that has dated. To its author’s credit, the subject of “Greek love†is dealt with in a sane and factual context – despite the judicial assassination of Oscar Wilde going on in the background.
A Cambridge don much admired by his students (including E. M. Forster), Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson belonged to the Apostles, a secret society with a strong ethic of male friendship. Alfred Tennyson and his beloved Arthur Hallam were early members. Dickinson is chiefly remembered as a historian and pacifist who played a significant part in the founding of the League of Nations. Inevitably, given his interests and intellectual background, he became a close associate of the Bloomsbury Group.
The Greek View of Life is no dry academic tome. It is a popularizing work in the best sense: accessibly written and illustrated with apt quotations given in sturdy translations, never in the original Greek. It is a joy to read.
(Introduction by Martin Geeson)
The extraordinary child-adult Prince Myshkin, confined for several years in a Swiss sanatorium suffering from severe epilepsy, returns to Russia to claim his inheritance and to find a place in healthy human society. The teeming St Petersburg community he enters is far from receptive to an innocent like himself, despite some early successes and relentless pursuit by grotesque fortune-hunters. His naive gaucheries give rise to extreme reactions among his new acquaintance, ranging from anguished protectiveness to mockery and contempt. But even before reaching the city, during the memorable train journey that opens the novel, he has encountered the demonic Rogozhin, the son of a wealthy merchant who is in thrall to the equally doomed Natasha Filippovna: beautiful, capricious and destructively neurotic, she joins with the two weirdly contrasted men in a spiralling dance of death… (Summary by Martin Geeson)