Andrei Navrozov
A Man of One Idea
(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.
Unpalatable Values: Culture as Gastronomy
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.
To my own callous ears, Gill is a typical New York neoconservative. What betrays him, I dare say, is the compulsion to appear forever young by espousing opinions that old fogeys are unlikely to hold in order to appeal to the tall blondes in tight jeans and pearly cashmere sweaters whom he vaguely imagines smiling in liberated approval over the morning’s skinny lattes. Scratch a neoconservative, and you will find the Nordic dream.
That’s Amore
Evolved discussion of men and their failings is the woman’s prerogative. Men are brought up to be binary. [Read the entire article here.]
Confessions of a Wealth Addict
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. [Read the entire article here.]
The Fugitive
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. The lesson that the Russian business community learned, however, was quite different: to keep the head on one’s shoulders, and the equity in one’s company, one must be in politics. On Putin’s side. [Read the entire article here.]
Dying of Consumption
“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.” [Read the entire article here.]
Bloody Good Show
Since time immemorial, or at least since about 1776, the tortuous, invariably rocky and often malodorous path that is the American way of wealth—a path that nowadays, increasingly, all the world seems to follow—was meant to run along the majestic, biblical mountain ridge joining aesthetics and ethics. To patriarchal shepherds like J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, money was always king. Incongruously, it was when money became God that the trouble started. [Read the entire article here.]
Mamma Mia, So Middle-Class
The neighbour’s house sported a prato inglese that required ostentatious watering at the crack of dawn, and by the reassuring suppleness of the English lawn beneath our feet we all knew that our host was a gentleman, not some television mogul from Cinecittà out of Rome whom, of a morning, one would be embarrassed to see on the beach in an argument with a Ukrainian girl in tears over a broken promise. [Read the entire article here.]
