Search Results

“... If you have​ a taste for travel you can visit the town of Weimar,’ Jorge Semprún wrote in 2001: It’s the town of Goethe, isn’t it? Charming. There are traces of him everywhere. There are memories of Schiller, of Liszt, of Nietzsche. After a visit to Goethe’s summer house, the following day you could walk the few kilometres which separate Weimar from the Buchenwald concentration camp on the Ettersberg hill, where Goethe liked to walk with the ineffable Eckermann ...”

“... bondage to the murderous entail began at the oak from which Doyle their servant was hanged. Jorge Semprun, at the opening of his autobiographical novel, is discovered half-way through his own troubles, standing in the snow, delighted by another tree, ‘so ein wunderschönes Baum’, as he remarks when he realises he is not alone. The place, after ...”

“... Claudin, the Communist intellectual who remained prominent in the Party till his expulsion with Jorge Semprun in 1964 (see that author’s fascinating The Autobiography of Federico Sanchez), he states that by ‘fulfilling the directives of Moscow to eliminate Largo Caballero [the Socialist Secretary-General] from the premiership and to unleash ...”

“... them. Adler also asserts – and this is new – that Duras was reported to Party headquarters by Jorge Semprun, another member of the PCF, for poking fun at Aragon. From the Fifties onwards Duras wrote and published frantically. The titles of her books were mesmerising: Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia (1953); Des journées entières dans les arbres ...”

“... to set against memories of Franco’s much deeper and broader bloodbath. Malraux, Sartre, Jorge Semprun, Laurie Lee, Victor Serge, Luis Buñuel and of course Orwell have their pages, but for a change – almost welcome – Hemingway and Gellhorn are absent. Instead, the American witnesses chosen by Ayrton are John Dos Passos and Muriel ...”