Parallel Lives is not a biography, still less a work of history, but a testament of amity and of love. It signals its author’s devoted friendship with an ardent, redoubtable widow called Larissa Salmina. It celebrates, too, Larissa’s adoration and emotional redemption of the art historian who became her husband, Francis Haskell. At a secondary level, the book is a protest at the encroachment of dim, cramping, sterile nationalism upon people with cultivated intellects. Pears reveres the dead-and-buried polyglots who used to uphold pan-European culture. He grieves for a defunct world of museum curators, scholars, conductors, dancers, collectors in exile, polymaths and patrons. It is noble to be cosmopolitan, in Pears’s telling, to speak and read foreign languages, to regard nationality as nugatory and border guards as pests. 

Pears draws on the recordings of his innumerable conversations with Larissa up to her death in 2024, and the voluminous diaries which Haskell kept from boyhood until his marriage in 1965. An inexperienced writer might have overused these richly quotable sources, but Pears has mastery of his material, in which the details are always complete but never saturating. 

Larissa was born in Leningrad in 1931. Her father, a Soviet army officer and chemical-warfare expert from a dispossessed noble family, took the complete works of Dickens with him to battle in Crimea. She had little formal education, but an enriching life at home, where she learned the piano, chess,