James Gleick in The New York Times:

As he did in his Pulitzer ­Prize-winning history of cancer, “The Emperor of All Maladies” (2010), Mukherjee views his subject panoptically, from a great and clarifying height, yet also intimately. Framing his story are pieces of his own family history: His cousin and two of his uncles “suffered from various unravelings of the mind,” and the specter of mental illness, presumably inherited or inheritable, haunts his family and his imagination. The books form a magnificent pair. “The Emperor of All Maladies” is, as Mukherjee notes, the story of the genetic code corrupted, tipping into malignancy. The new book, then, serves as its prequel. “Nothing about the natural world, at first glance, suggests the existence of a gene,” he writes. “Indeed, you have to perform rather bizarre experimental contortions to uncover the idea of discrete particles of inheritance.” The man who performed those bizarre contortions was the monk Gregor Mendel, living in an abbey in Brno, Austria-Hungary (now in the Czech Republic). The abbey had five acres of garden. Forbidden by the abbot to experiment on field mice, Mendel began growing peas. And he did not just plant them; he made hybrids, crossing tall plants with short plants, white flowers with purple flowers, smooth pods with crumpled pods. “He began to discern patterns in the data — unanticipated constancies, conserved ratios, numerical rhythms,” Mukherjee writes. “He had tapped, at last, into heredity’s inner logic.” After almost eight plodding years he wrote a paper, which he read in 1865 to a room of farmers and botanists in Brno and published in the yearly “Proceedings of the Brno Natural Science Society.” And then — nothing. The history of science is a tangled web, not a logical arc, and for four decades Mendel’s pioneering work — “the study that founded modern biology,” as Mukherjee describes with only a touch of hyperbole — effectively disappeared. The founding of modern biology had to wait till the turn of the century. Mendel’s forgotten paper was discovered by biologists in Amsterdam, Cambridge and elsewhere. Mendel had discovered the basic unit of heredity, had proved there must be such a unit, and finally a Danish botanist, Wilhelm Johannsen, gave it a name: “gene,” he suggested — “a very applicable little word.”

What is the gene? First it was an abstraction, an enigma, “a ghost lurking in the biological machine,” Mukherjee writes. By definition the gene was the carrier of any trait that is heritable or partly heritable. One would say there are genes for eye color, height or even intelligence. But some traits are better defined than others. People have long bred dogs, for example, to be “short-haired, longhaired, pied, piebald, bowlegged, hairless, crop-tailed, vicious, mild-mannered, diffident, guarded, belligerent.”

More here.

Fishers of Men

—After Duccio di Buoninsegna

A raw blue light.
The morning moon and a small wind
hold us fast between sea and sky.
Dawn hangs exhausted
above the lake of Tiberiade,
our sails weighted down
with morning dew.
All night we caught nothing,
our aching bodies
bent beneath the heavy dark,
pliable as waves, wet wood
creaking against worn leather.
Now dog tired, we wash
our empty nets,
though all we want is a cup of wine
a dry shirt and bed.
God and miracles are far
from our minds
as we heave in the windlass
just one more time.
In this floating world
where the sea is made of words
and waves whisper covenants
as fish become men,
silver blue bodies pour though the mesh,
sardine-scales coating our hair,
our skin in luminous benediction.

by Sue Hubbard
.

F.A. Hayek in Notes on Liberty:

Between the rails and the building of the railway station of Bad Ischl there used to be ample space where, sixty years ago, in the season, a regular promenade used to develop before the departure of the night train to Vienna.

I believe it was on the last day of August 1918 that here, among a boisterous crowd of young officers returning to the front after visiting their families on furlough in the Salzkammergut district, two artillery ensigns became vaguely aware that they ought to know one another. I am not sure whether it was a resemblance to other members of our families or because we had actually met before that led us to ask the other, “Aren’t you a Wittgenstein?” (or, perhaps, “Aren’t you a Hayek?”). At any rate it led to our travelling together through the night to Vienna, and even though most of the time we naturally tried to sleep we did manage to converse a little.

Some parts of this conversation made a strong impression on me. He was not only much irritated by the high spirits of the noisy and probably half-drunk party of fellow-officers with which we shared the carriage without in the least concealing his contempt for mankind in general, but he also took it for granted that any relation of his no matter how distantly connected must have the same standards as himself. He was not so very wrong! I was then very young and inexperienced, barely nineteen and the product of what would now be called a puritanical education: the kind in which the ice-cold bath my father took every morning was the much admired (though rarely imitated) standard of discipline for body and mind. And Ludwig Wittgenstein was just ten years my senior.

What struck me most in this conversation was a radical passion for truthfulness in everything (which I came to know as a characteristic vogue among the young Viennese intellectuals of the generation immediately preceding mine only in the following university years). This truthfulness became almost a fashion in that border group between the purely Jewish and the purely Gentile parts of the intelligentsia in which I came so much to move. It meant much more than truth in speech. One had to “live” truth and not tolerate any pretence in oneself or others. It sometimes produced outright rudeness and, certainly, unpleasantness.

More here.

Ashutosh Jogalekar in The Curious Wavefunction:

Hardy calls his association with Ramanujan “the one true romantic incident of his life”, and the film does give us an idea of why he might have thought so.

The movie also does a good job dwelling on the math which is really the meat of Ramanujan’s life. To its credit it actually features an actual explanation of one of Ramanujan’s greatest accomplishments – his work on partitions with Hardy. Ramanujan’s ability to divine great theorems virtually from scratch was legendary of course, and even today mathematicians are finding gems in his books and wondering how he could figure out all these counterintuitive and novel math results based on nothing more than a high school education. Like John von Neumann Ramanujan was the ultimate autodidact, and both his and von Neumann’s accomplishments really give us a flavor of the extraordinary hidden potential that human minds hold. But one crucial aspect of Ramanujan’s personality that the film shines light on is his sheer obsession with math and the immense amount of hard work that he put in. Almost all through his adult life until his death, math was all he did. Ramanujan was a bona fide genius, no doubt about that, but the way he ate and drank and breathed and lived math makes it clear that even geniuses’ accomplishments come only from great toil and effort.

More here.

Robert B. Reich in Literary Hub:

In order to have a “free market,” decisions must be made about:

• PROPERTY: what can be owned
• MONOPOLY: what degree of market power is permissible
• CONTRACT: what can be bought and sold, and on what terms
• BANKRUPTCY: what happens when purchasers can’t pay up
• ENFORCEMENT: how to make sure no one cheats on any of these rules

You might think such decisions obvious. Ownership, for example, is simply a matter of what you’ve created or bought or invented, what’s yours.

Think again. What about slaves? The human genome? A nuclear bomb? A recipe? Most contemporary societies have decided you can’t own these things. You can own land, a car, mobile devices, a home, and all the things that go into a home. But the most important form of property is now intellectual property—­new designs, ideas, and inventions. What exactly counts as intellectual property, and how long can you own it?

Decisions also underlie what degree of market power is permissible—­how large and economically potent a company or small group of firms can become, or to what extent dominance over a standard platform or search engine unduly constrains competition.

Similarly, you may think buying and selling is simply a matter of agreeing on a price—­just supply and demand. But most societies have decided against buying and selling sex, babies, and votes. Most don’t allow the sale of dangerous drugs, unsafe foods, or deceptive Ponzi schemes. Similarly, most civilized societies do not allow or enforce contracts that are coerced or that are based on fraud. But what exactly does “coercion” mean? Or even “fraud”?

More here.

Alan Jacobs at The New Atlantis:

The British passport was so “transformed” because it met, or seemed to meet, a need never mentioned in the debates over what the French and other European nations demanded. We may call it the Miss Marple problem: Setting aside foreigners, who always and instantly raise suspicions when they turn up in charming little villages like Chipping Cleghorn, how do you know that your neighbors are who they say they are?

In their introduction to a collection of essays extending the work of Raymond Williams, The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850, Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward note that “during the sixteenth century, most men and women worked in the agrarian sector and lived in the countryside, while fewer than five percent of them lived in towns. By the middle of the nineteenth century that had changed so dramatically that towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants together comprised roughly half the population of England.” And of course that trend has only continued, in England and elsewhere in the world, in the decades since. Such a trend means that places like Chipping Cleghorn will inevitably decline in population, affected as their people are by the gravitational pull of the great metropolises; but the resulting circulation of persons created will bring the occasional stranger into the village’s small orbit. The arrival of an Arnaud du Tilh, under his own name or some other, will be a regular, not an exceptional, occurrence. And what do the long-term residents do about that?

In A Murder Is Announced, Miss Marple comments that in the modern world, “People take you at your own valuation. They don’t wait to call until they’ve had a letter from a friend saying that the So-and-So’s are delightful people and she’s known them all their lives.” Why would anyone take an unknown woman at her “own valuation”?

more here.

Kaya Genç at The Millions:

Dmitri Shostakovich was, by Julian Barnes’s reckoning, a coward. The leading composer ofJoseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev’s USSR, Shostakovich never stood up to power; he was a constant compromiser, accepting what was asked of him by Soviet leaders and giving speeches written by party ideologues. When Soviet Culture Commissar Andrei Zhdanov lectured Soviet artists on the merits of socialist realism and the ills of formalism, ordering them to follow the Zhdanov Doctrine (“The only conflict that is possible in Soviet culture is the conflict between good and best”), Shostakovich did not oppose this shallow culture commissar. He was even compelled to join, in a music congress in New York, the public denunciation of the Soviet Union’s leading exiled composer Igor Stravinsky. In return, Shostakovich was rewarded with every available prize the party handed out to the faithful.

The opening chapter of The Noise of Time, Barnes’s portrait of the composer, puts us on the platform of a train station. The scene seems to come directly out of an Alfred Hitchcock film. A beggar (“the man — in reality half a man”) propels himself using a strange vehicle, “a low trolley with wooden wheels” that can only be steered by wrenching at “the contraption’s front edge.” In order to avoid overbalancing, the beggar uses a “rope that passed underneath the trolley [and] was looped through the top of his trousers.”

more here.

Gary Saul Morson at The New Criterion:

As Dante makes the punishments of hell appropriate to one’s sins, Dostoevsky has his madmen experience a hell appropriate to their philosophy. The ghosts who pay social calls on Svidrigailov are decorous, boring, and not the least bit otherworldly. In their triviality, they promise a world to come even more pointless than this one. “We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast!” Svidrigailov observes. “But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like an outhouse in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is?”

When Raskolnikov reproaches him with his monstrous crimes, Svidrigailov points to the oddity of a moralist murderer, but he is also ready with excuses. If, as the progressives argue, people are wholly the product of their environment, if free will is an illusion, and if crime derives solely from bad social conditions, then how, he asks, can I be personally responsible? “The question is, am I a monster or am I myself a victim?” Besides, he continues, even if I have grievously insulted others, well, “human beings in general greatly love to be insulted” because taking offense allows them to feel morally superior. Why, people even seek out ways to feel offended! My students, who know just what Svidrigailov has in mind, appreciate Dostoevsky’s relevance.

more here.

What is the Sea

The sweep of a trawler net across the length of the bed,
mesh at maximum, in the tank seven hundred thousand
litres of diesel, down below bags of potatoes and onions,
shifts of thirty-five hours, sleep for four, some coffee,
agreements signed in offices in Brussels, increasing
illex squid in proportion to the water temperature
and the approvals signed in the Supreme Court, circuit
of stainless steel channels where the catch falls,
pollock, hake, permit transfers with the support
of the Ministry of Farming and Fisheries; there:
the fishing boat crosses the imaginary parallel, goes
after a stain on the screen of the detector machine,
the shoal ignorant of the notion of miles or charter,
of the made-up Fisheries Institute stats or the gap
between wages and cost of living since the year 1992,
long-tailed hake fillet, Seamen’s Union and rattail,
faked credit letters, lamps and Asian flag of convenience,
outbreak of foot and mouth in British herds, hoki,
chuck back to the very depths tons of dead cuttlefish
when langoustine (five times greater value) appears,
storage infrastructure and cold, fishing ground, that.
.

by Sergio Raimondi
from Poesía civil
publisher: Vox, Bahía Blanca
translation: Ben Bollig
First published on Poetry International

Read more »

George Eaton in New Statesman:

This time, the polls weren’t wrong. For months, as Sadiq Khan maintained his lead over Zac Goldsmith, the Labour candidate’s team were haunted by memories of the 2015 general election. The Conservatives’ unforeseen majority meant victory was never assumed. Labour MPs feared that low turnout or a “Bradley effect”, with voters shunning a Muslim candidate in the privacy of the polling booth, would destroy Khan's hopes. But his victory was just as comfortable as forecasts suggested. In the final round of voting, Khan beat Goldsmith by 57-43, the second largest margin since the mayoralty was established in 2000 (the year Ken Livingstone defeated Steve Norris by 58-42). With more than 1.3m votes, Khan achieved the biggest personal mandate of any politician in UK history. It is hard to recall that his triumph was never initially regarded as inevitable. London is a Labour city but one that has twice elected a Conservative. Many predicted that Zac Goldsmith – telegenic, green, liberal, independent-minded – would emulate Boris Johnson’s achievements. Yet the Tory candidate was not merely beaten but thrashed. After a cynical campaign that painted Khan as the friend of Islamist extremists, he suffered the worst fate for a politician: losing with dishonour.

Khan’s strategists cited four insights as central to his success. The first was that “personality matters more than policy”. Having seen Miliband defined by his opponents (“weak”, “weird”, “treacherous”), Khan’s team “set out hard and fast to paint a picture of who he was”. His election leaflets rooted his policies in his personal story: “the bus driver’s son who’ll make commuting more affordable”, “the council estate boy who’ll fix the Tory housing crisis” and “the British Muslim who’ll take on the extremists”. By the end of the campaign, journalists groaned at the mention of his bus driver father: a sure sign of success. As victorious campaigns testify, the best messaging is simple and repetitive. “The bus driver’s son” was Khan’s equivalent of the Tories’ “long-term economic plan”. By contrast, Goldsmith failed to define himself personally, allowing Labour to paint the billionaire’s son as posh and aloof. The second insight was that policy should be announced early – and then endlessly reannounced. All of Khan’s signature pledges – the fares freeze, “first dibs” on new homes, the “London living rent” – were made by January.

More here.

Mitch Leslie in Science:

You can’t survive without mitochondria, the organelles that power most human cells. Nor, researchers thought, can any other eukaryotes—the group of organisms we belong to along with other animals, plants, fungi, and various microscopic creatures. But a new study has identified the first eukaryote that has ditched its mitochondria, suggesting that our branch on the tree of life may be more versatile than researchers thought. “This is a discovery of fundamental importance,” says evolutionary biologist Eugene Koonin of the National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Maryland, who wasn’t connected to the study. “We now know that eukaryotes can live happily without any remnant of the mitochondria.”

Mitochondria are the descendants of bacteria that settled down inside primordial eukaryotic cells, eventually becoming the power plants for their new hosts. Although mitochondria are a signature feature of eukaryotes, scientists have long wondered whether some of them might have gotten rid of the organelles. The diarrhea-causing microbe Giardia intestinalis for a time seemed mitochondria-free, but on closer investigation, it and other suspects proved to be false alarms, containing shrunken versions of the organelles. For the new study, a team led by evolutionary biologist Anna Karnkowska, a postdoc, and her adviser, Vladimir Hampl, of Charles University in Prague, checked another candidate, a species in the genus Monocercomonoides. The single-celled organism came from the guts of a chinchilla that belonged to one of the lab members. The team decided to test it because it belonged to a group of microbes that scientists posited had lost their mitochondria. When the researchers sequenced Monocercomonoides’s genome, they found no signs of mitochondrial genes (the organelles carry their own DNA). Digging deeper, they determined that it lacks all of the key proteins that enable mitochondria to function. “The definition of eukaryotic cells is that they have mitochondria,” says Karnkowska, who is now at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in Canada. “We overturn this definition.”

More here.

In an era of rapidly proliferating, precisely targeted treatments, every cancer case has to be played by ear.

Siddhartha Mukherjee in the New York Times:

The bone-marrow biopsy took about 20 minutes. It was 10 o’clock on an unusually chilly morning in New York in April, and Donna M., a self-possessed 78-year-old woman, had flown in from Chicago to see me in my office at Columbia University Medical Center. She had treated herself to orchestra seats for “The Humans” the night before, and was now waiting in the room as no one should be asked to wait: pants down, spine curled, knees lifted to her chest — a grown woman curled like a fetus. I snapped on sterile gloves while the nurse pulled out a bar cart containing a steel needle the length of an index finger. The rim of Donna’s pelvic bone was numbed with a pulse of anesthetic, and I drove the needle, as gently as I could, into the outer furl of bone.

Dr. Azra Raza speaking to Donna M.

A corkscrew of pain spiraled through her body as the marrow was pulled, and then a few milliliters of red, bone-flecked sludge filled the syringe. It was slightly viscous, halfway between liquid and gel, like the crushed pulp of an overripe strawberry.

I had been treating Donna in collaboration with my colleague Azra Raza for six years. Donna has a preleukemic syndrome called myelodysplastic syndrome, or MDS, which affects the bone marrow and blood. It is a mysterious disease with few known treatments. Human bone marrow is normally a site for the genesis of most of our blood cells — a white-walled nursery for young blood. In MDS, the bone-marrow cells acquire genetic mutations, which force them to grow uncontrollably — but the cells also fail to mature into blood, instead dying in droves. It is a dual curse. In most cancers, the main problem is cells that refuse to stop growing. In Donna’s marrow, this problem is compounded by cells that refuse to grow up.

More here.

Micah Yongo in Media Diversified:

‘A person’s identity,’ Lebanese-French author Amin Maalouf once wrote, ‘is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.’

It was these words that came to mind as I finished reading Haris A. Durrani’s intriguing debut novella, Technologies of the Self: a shrewd commentary on identity and culture that masquerades so well as something else that by the time you finish reading you almost feel hoodwinked.

The story begins as a classic immigrant family drama, complete with amusing observations on life as a western millennial born to parents from differing and more traditional cultures. However, we are soon ushered seamlessly from the smell of plátanos and the rapid, witty dialogue of family members around the dining table, into some of the broader themes that are explored.

The protagonist is a young American Muslim who wrestles to reconcile the varying influences of family, faith and place. Son to a Pakistani father and Dominican mother, Jihad – or, to his Caucasian counterparts, ‘Joe’ – journeys through his own memories and those of his family as he seeks to examine the immigrant experience and understand himself in relation to it.

More here. [Thanks to H. M. Naqvi.]

Carl Engelking in Discover Magazine:

Computers are becoming rather versatile copycats, thanks to deep-learning algorithms.

Just last year, researchers “trained” machines to transfer the brushstrokes of iconic artists onto any still image. Now, Manuel Ruder and a team of computer scientists from the University of Freiburg in Germany have taken the technology a step further: They’re altering videos. The team’s style transfer algorithm makes clips from Ice Age or the television show Miss Marple appear as living paintings crafted by the likes of Van Gogh, Picasso or any other artist. And the results speak for themselves.

Deep-learning algorithms rely on artificial neural networks that operate similarly to the connections in our brain. They allow computers to identify complex patterns and relationships in data by parsing it layer by layer. More fine-grained information is extracted the deeper the layers go. Last year, researchers at the University of Tubingen demonstrated that it was possible to separate the content of an image from its artistic style using these deep-learning algorithms. Basically, they could use an artist’s “style” like an image filter, regardless of the image’s content — you can now add a Starry Night twist to your own images. Ruder and his team built upon this work, and applied it frame-by-frame in videos.

More here.

Raghuram Rajan in Project Syndicate:

In their efforts to stimulate demand by pursuing increasingly aggressive monetary policies, advanced economies have been imposing risks on emerging-market countries such as India. Indeed, one day we face surging capital inflows, as investors go into “risk-on” mode, and outflows the next as they switch risk off.

India has responded to this external volatility by trying to create a domestic platform of macroeconomic stability on which to build growth. India’s latest central budget emphasizes fiscal prudence, adheres to past commitments, and aims at structural reforms, especially in agriculture. Fiscal consolidation has also helped to keep the current-account deficit under 1% of GDP. Moreover, inflation has been brought within the official target range. And parliament has created a monetary-policy committee for the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), which should ensure that multiple views are embedded in policy and improve continuity.

We must also address banks’ non-performing loans so that their balance sheets have room for new lending. Unlike more developed countries, India does not have an effective bankruptcy system (though a bill to create one has just cleared the lower house of Parliament). But, using some “out-of-court resolution” mechanisms devised by the RBI, and with capital support from the government, banks should have well-provisioned balance sheets by March 2017.

Perhaps the hardest challenge has been to persuade the public, impatient for rapid growth, of the need to ensure stability first. Growth, it is argued, is always more important, regardless of the looming economic risks. Yet, despite the focus on stability, inhospitable global growth conditions, and two successive droughts (any of which would have thrown the economy into a tailspin in the past), growth is above 7%.

The task is to build on this base. For the first time in decades, global trade has grown more slowly than global output.

More here.

Svetlana Alexievich at the Times Literary Supplement:

Why does this book have so many stories of suicides instead of more typical Soviets with typically Soviet life stories? When it comes down to it, people end their lives for love, from fear of old age, or just out of curiosity, from a desire to come face to face with the mystery of death. I sought out people who had been permanently bound to the Soviet idea, letting it penetrate them so deeply, there was no separating them: the state had become their entire cosmos, blocking out everything else, even their own lives. They couldn’t just walk away from History, leaving it all behind and learning to live without it – diving head first into the new way of life and dissolving into private existence, like so many others who now allowed what used to be minor details to become their big picture. Today, people just want to live their lives, they don’t need some great idea. This is entirely new for Russia; it’s unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else – hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarized. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn’t recognize their own slavery – they even liked being slaves. I remember it well: after we finished school, we’d volunteer to go on class trips to the Virgin Lands⁴ and we’d look down on the students who didn’t want to come. We were bitterly disappointed that the Revolution and Civil War had all happened before our time. Now you wonder: was that really us? Was that me? I reminisced alongside my protagonists. One of them said, ‘Only a Soviet can understand another Soviet.’ We share a communist collective memory. We’re neighbours in memory. […]

more here.

Aaron Thier at The Nation:

Goethe Dies, translated from the German by James Reidel (Seagull; $21), is a brief and headlong collection—just four stories in 76 pages—but any reader susceptible to Thomas Bernhard’s charm will be transfixed by it in a few sentences. Bernhard, who died in 1989 at the age of 58, is one of the great stylists of the 20th century, and his writing is an irreducible essence, an ungovernable torrent of lunacy and glee, impossible to paraphrase but immediately recognizable.

In the title story, Goethe dies as advertised. Before he does, however, he conceives a desire to summon Wittgenstein to his bedside (the two men are contemporaries in this reality). But Wittgenstein dies before the meeting can be arranged—and this is essentially all that happens. The story consists of the remarks, or an elaborate description of the remarks, that Goethe’s secretary and various associates make about his desire that the meeting should take place. This is a desire they aim to gratify or frustrate, according to obscure whims of their own. The narrator, who may be present for some of this and may be a fanciful version of Bernhard himself, is painstaking in his attribution of the most irrelevant statements, which produces wonderfully tortured formulations like “Riemer underscored that Goethe allegedly said…,” or, even better, this: “the idea of inviting Wittgenstein to Weimar occurred to Goethe at the end of February, thus said Riemer presently, and not at the beginning of March, as Kräuter maintained, and it was Kräuter who learned from Eckermann that Eckermann would prevent Wittgenstein from travelling to Weimar to see Goethe at all costs.”

more here.

Catherine Brown at Literary Review:

Fans of Teffi in this country have had to wait only two years since the publication of Subtly Worded, her remarkable collection of short stories, for two further volumes to appear. Memories, her memoir of the Civil War, and Rasputin and Other Ironies, a collection of shorter reminiscences, are both, like Subtly Worded, published by Pushkin Press and translated by the excellent Robert Chandler and colleagues.

From these books we gain a much better sense of Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya (as Teffi was born) as a person. No longer do I think of her as the female Chekhov or the Russian Saki, but simply as Teffi – or rather unsimply, since she is both robust and vulnerable, sensible and absurd, compassionate and satirical. I wish that the portrait of her by Ilya Repin, described in her essay on the painter, had survived (perhaps even to feature in the ‘Russia and the Arts’ exhibition now on at the National Portrait Gallery in London). It would have been fascinating to see which of these qualities Repin managed to capture.

The wry perceptiveness that was apparent in Subtly Worded is evident again in several pieces here: in ‘The Merezhkovskys’; in ‘Liza’, a portrait of a quixotically mendacious friend; and in ‘How I Live and Work’, which paints a picture of her messy Montparnasse desk.

more here.