Новости за 28.12.2016

On the memoirs of Saul Friedländer, who became an historian of Nazi Germany after escaping the Holocaust as a child in France. “It is an odd, queasy-making search for knowledge, this hunt for more unbearable reality. As if we might give order to lawless terror by ever more refined scholarship. I’ve often wondered whether the impulse derives from something more primitive than that, a wish to stand on one’s tiptoes and peer through the keyhole of depravity, transfixed by horror”

Fan fiction. “She used the courtesy title Princess sparingly, and purely for political effect. She became a field operative managing diverse intelligence assets under the cover of diplomatic and sapient-relief travel. Before the Battle of Scarif, her missions shared intelligence with numerous Alliance cells. Her uncanny ability to predict the actions of enemies and allies alike made her essential, but the Alliance treated her warily, concerned she might manipulate its forces for her own ends”

Richard Adams’s grand-daughter recounts the family lore underpinning Watership Down. “Bustling preparations for a car journey take time: the need to check on children, belongings and provisions, to make certain of the route and the vehicle. In the 1960s driving from London to Stratford-upon-Avon took three hours. For two little girls such a period could be delightful, given that their father, Richard Adams, would come up with fantastical tales en route”

First published a year ago, now ungated as the FT kindly brings its Lunch with … archive out from behind the paywall. The general drift of the conversation here, much of it pegged to Purity, is that Kellaway wants to like Franzen, and thinks he gets an unfairly bad press — but Franzen won’t make it easy for her. “His idea of himself as a truth-teller is only partly why people find him so aggravating. There is something about the man himself, and his variety of superior maleness, that also annoys”