Andrei-navrozov 
Articles and Posts by Andrei-navrozov:
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A Man of One Idea(16)
(A review of The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II, by Viktor Suvorov; Annapolis: Naval Institute Press; 384 pp., $38.95
The Russian edition of Viktor Suvorov’s Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? sports a blurb on the back, quoting a review of the English translation of the book published in a British newspaper on May 5, 1990.
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Unpalatable Values: Culture as Gastronomy(0)
To American readers the name A.A. Gill may mean nothing, but in England the restaurant and television critic of the Sunday Times is a cultural force to be reckoned with. A witty autodidact, with plenty of disdain for the pieties of the moment, to easily deafened ears he is a Jeremiah of the petit-four and British journalism’s loosest cannon.
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That’s Amore(0)
Evolved discussion of men and their failings is the woman’s prerogative. Men are brought up to be binary.
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Confessions of a Wealth Addict(0)
Let’s face it, money is a drug. Not one of those recreational substances that get models into trouble and the Daily Mail, but the Class A kind, the mind-bending, will-destroying hallucinogen more addictive than heroin.
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The Fugitive(0)
The public humbling of Mikhail Khodorkovsky at the hands of Vladimir Putin five years ago has had a curious effect on Western perceptions of Russia: those analysing the incarceration of Khodorkovsky and the expropriation of Yucos concluded that Russian tycoons must stay out of politics.
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Curiosity as a Social Force(1)
“Curious Barbara’s got her nose in a sling,” goes the Russian admonition against prurience, more puzzling, if anything, than the equivalent English adage concerning the killing, in similarly umbrageous circumstances, of the cat. Why should Barbara meet with such a fate? Just how did it happen that curiosity brought about the death of Fluffy? As a child, one wonders about these things. In middle age, one wonders about them all over again.
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A Spy Thriller to the Wise (Review: Agent Zigzag)(7)
It is almost inevitable that a reader of my interests and disposition should slightly miss the point of this book, described in a Daily Express blurb as “a good spy thriller,” and that is precisely what I propose to do. Spy thrillers are plentiful; they are summer reading at its Sardinian beachiest. To review one head-on in this space is a little like coming to a Tennyson Society dinner in nothing but a bracelet of turquoise beads and a floppy panama.
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Dying of Consumption(0)
“For his birthday his wife gave him a riding crop that cost 100 francs,” a writer called Arnold Ruge complained of his newly married friend, a fellow German émigré in Paris, “and the poor fool does not ride, nor has he a horse. Everything he sees he wants to have, a carriage, smart clothes, a flower garden, new furniture from the Exhibition, in fact the moon.”
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Dying Hyenas in Regent’s Park(0)
Perhaps apocryphally, a reactionary by the name of Hitler once pronounced that colour film is the way of the future. Pseudo-reality would have been much broader and more accurate, but in any case the fulfilment of this apocalyptic prophecy, if Frieze is any indication, is at hand. Continue reading . . .
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New Russian Roulette(2)
In the 1930s even some of the older and more intellectual Russians, including those who had seen a bit of the world in their youth, believed that the United States was the land of the Yellow Devil, meaning gold. It was said that when one American met another in the street, he greeted him as follows: “Make money?” To which the other replied, with Puritan candour: “Very much, thank you.” Continue reading . . .
