Brenda Maddox
On the Stein Trail
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
By Janet Malcolm
Yale University Press 229pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Good question: how did two Jewish lesbians survive in Nazi-occupied France? Janet Malcolm addresses the mystery. Gertrude Stein and her lover, Alice B Toklas, both from Jewish-American business families, refused all suggestions that they return to the United States or steal quietly into neutral Switzerland. Instead they stayed put, mainly at Bilignin, their village in eastern France, and watched others being rounded up and sent to German camps.
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I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.