Wells, Anthony Archives

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The Dream that Failed

Anthony Wells on Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope

Nadezhda Mandelstam was born Nadezhda Khazina in the southern Russian town of Saratov, on the Volga, in 1899, into a middle-class Jewish family. Her father was a lawyer and her mother a doctor, one of the first women in Russia to be allowed to qualify. Early in her life the family moved to Kiev, where Nadezhda attended school and then studied art. But she is famous not as an artist – she never pursued her career – but as the wife, and widow, of the poet Osip Mandelstam, whom she met in Kiev in 1919 and married soon after; and for the two-volume memoir she wrote clandestinely in the 1960s, remembering her life with her husband and reflecting on the ‘catastrophe’, as she calls it, that had overtaken them and their friends, acquaintances and contemporaries, and their homeland, since the Bolsheviks seized power.

1 Sep 2022

The Great Self-Examiner

Anthony Wells on the essays of Michel de Montaigne

Can anyone reconcile us with death? Michel de Montaigne, one of the great sages of the Renaissance, tried his best; and he was trying to reconcile himself as much as any readers he might have. ‘We must always be booted and ready to go,’ he writes in an early essay. To be ready we need to familiarize our- selves with this final destination. ‘So,’ he tells us, ‘I have formed the habit of having death continually present, not merely in my imagination, but in my mouth . . . He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.’

1 Mar 2021

Episode 27: Dr Wiener’s Library

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Anthony Wells worked at The Wiener Holocaust Library in London for a decade. In this episode he leads the Slightly Foxed editors into the history of the library, which holds one of the most extensive archives on the Holocaust and the Nazi era. We travel to Germany, Amsterdam, New York and Tel Aviv, but it is people rather than places that the library remembers with its annals of personal stories. Dr Alfred Wiener, a German Jew who fought in the First World War, was one of the first to note the rise of the Nazi Party, and he began to assemble an archive of information in order to undermine their activities. From downfall by documentation in the Nuremberg Trial to a tracing service made up of millions of records, we learn how The Wiener Library ensures that those who disappeared are not forgotten.

15 Jan 2021

Scoops of the Century

Anthony Wells on Clare Hollingworth, There’s a German Just Behind Me

Clare Hollingworth lived to the high old age of 105, spending much of her last years in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in her adopted home of Hong Kong. Even at the age of 92 she was said to be prepared to head out to whatever hot-spot her editor might want to send her to. After reading There’s a German Just Behind Me, you’ll rather wish her editor had given her the call.

3 Jun 2019

Marcel

Anthony Wells on Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Stretching over seven books and amounting to more than 3,000 pages, Proust’s novel opens with the narrator remembering times when, as a boy, he stayed with his parents, his grandmother and their housekeeper, Françoise, in his great-aunt’s house in the village of Combray. We are not told at any stage what age this boy is, nor what he is called. We are plunged only into the boy’s mind and feelings . . .

1 Jun 2018

High Society, Low Life

Anthony Wells on Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Marcel Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past begins, as I discussed in an earlier piece (SF no. 56), with the narrator recalling the times he spent as a boy in his great-aunt’s house in the village of Combray. There were two walks the family regularly took from the house, one in the direction of a property owned by a family friend, M. Swann, and the other in the direction of an estate owned by a very grand aristocratic family with local connections, the Guermantes. The Way by Swann’s, the first walk, is the name of the first book of Proust’s novel. The Guermantes Way, the second walk, is the name of the third, and with it the narrator and reader enter a new world, of dukes and duchesses, princes and princesses, and all the high society of Paris’s fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain.

1 Mar 2018

Introducing M. Swann

Anthony Wells on Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

The first time my wife-to-be invited me round for a meal, and sat me down in her book-lined dining-room, my eye was caught by three thick volumes in a slipcase, in decorative blue, white and red dust- wrappers, bearing the name ‘Marcel Proust’ in large black letters at the top of each spine. ‘You’ve read Proust!’ I burst out, thrilled to be able to add to the array of charms with which she had already dazzled me that of having read the incomparable Remembrance of Things Past.

1 Dec 2017

A Terrible Hidden Country

Anthony Wells on Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

If there were quiz questions about the subtitles of books, this – ‘An Experiment in Literary Investigation’ – might be among the trickier ones, offering as it does no hint of the book’s subject matter. But a taster of what is to follow, and of the reason behind the subtitle, comes at once in the book’s preface.

1 Sep 2015

Fishcakes!

Anthony Wells on Robert Graves, Lars Porsena or the Future of Swearing

The future of swearing, what a wonderful subject. I looked forward to learning more: since the book was blessedly short, at 94 pages, 22 lines a page and only 6 words a line, finishing it wouldn’t require many train journeys. And not only to learning but also to an hour or possibly two of literary pleasure. I had read Goodbye to All That, Graves’s great memoir of his service in the First World War, and knew how well he could write. I recalled, too, from that other book a passage on the ordinary soldiers’ wearisome use of a four-letter expletive still so current today. Graves should certainly have interesting things to say on the subject.

1 Mar 2015

Aunt Freda Opens a Door

Anthony Wells on The Encyclopaedia Britannica

One day in the late 1980s I had a call from my Aunt Freda. It came completely out of the blue, for although Freda had been my favourite godmother throughout my childhood, I had hardly exchanged a word with her – save the odd Christmas card – for what must have been twenty years. The purpose of her call was to tell me she had a box of books to give me and would I like to pick them up from my parents’ house in Sheffield, where she would drop them off on her next visit. ‘There’s a complete Shakespeare, Churchill’s Island Race and an encyclopaedia,’ she said by way of brief explanation.

1 Dec 2014

Comfortable Words

Anthony Wells on the 1662 Book of Common Prayer

To find the Book of Common Prayer among the collection was a surprise. To discover the name of Kurt Hahn – the founder of Gordonstoun and originator of Outward Bound – stamped on the inside cover, an even greater one. There was the intriguing, if minor, question of how a book of Hahn’s had found its way into Robert Weltsch’s library, but that may not have been so odd: Hahn was also part of the German-Jewish diaspora in Britain, even if not connected to the Prague circle (although he was descended from a Grand Rabbi of Prague on his mother’s side). Weltsch had been director of the Leo Baeck Institute in London, whose purpose was to recover the history of the German Jews; no doubt Kurt Hahn had been interested in its work. He probably contributed to it, perhaps providing a memoir of how he had protested against Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, been briefly imprisoned, struggled to keep his boarding-school at Salem going through the first year of the Third Reich, and then, recognizing the impossible, left the German tyranny behind and moved to Britain to re-found his school in a new setting.

1 Dec 2012