Brigid Brophy’s most recent books are The Prince and the Wild Geese, the text for a series of drawings inspired by Prince Gagarin’s love for Julia Taaffe in 1832, and A Guide to Public Lending Right.
You possess two pain-killing injections and you encounter two casualties of an earthquake. Should you administer a shot apiece or give both to the person in the worse pain? Alternatively, you have enough medicine to treat one wound. Do you save the endangered leg of X or the endangered toe of Y, who has already lost a leg?
What can have possessed Graham Greene? The answer, I suspect, is the ghost of Thomas Mann. The Swiss setting of Doctor Fischer of Geneva might be determined by some generic effluvium of Mann, a compound of his Magic (Swiss) Mountain, his post-war return to Switzerland and, perhaps, his rather landlocked position at the centre of European letters. But the Dybbuk that seems to have taken over Mr Greene’s imagination is specific: German Mann, pre-war Mann, long-short-story Mann (author of, in particular, that other piece of magic-making, Mario and the Magician) and, positively and peculiarly, Mann in translation.
‘The aim of this work,’ Colin MacCabe announces, ‘is not to provide the meaning of Joyce’s work but to allow it to be read.’
Brophy’s writing is propelled by the excitement of the intellect, while the emotion is held within the structure. She found a form for her work that accommodated her need for artifice, for self-creation...
The literature on Mozart is almost as diverse, though surely not quite so glorious, as Mozart’s own output. These three books are a case in point: a freewheeling analysis of Mozart the...
Amusing, and perhaps instructive, to think of great paintings whose voyage into mystery and meaning seems to depend, in the first instance, on a technical trick: a separation of planes so that...
In his recent book Reasons and Persons the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit is inclined to decide that persons have no existence, and that the motives to morality are for that reason clearer and...
The Prince and the Wild Geese is a story of 1832 told in words and pictures, the words almost all Brigid Brophy’s, the pictures by Prince Grégoire Gagarin, artist son of the Russian...
Brigid Brophy’s novels have often been described as ‘brilliantly written’: a judgment which can have done her sales little good. (‘Don’t bother with that book...
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