Ian Thomson

In 2011, Anders Breivik murdered 69 teenagers in a socialist summer camp outside the Norwegian capital of Oslo, and eight adults with a bomb attack. His hatred was directed at the children of Norwegian politicians who had allowed immigration to contaminate the sturdy bond (as he saw it) of Nordic race and nationhood. ‘You will all die today, Marxists!’ he hurrahed as he stalked and shot his way to infamy. Inflated with self-importance, Breivik was a self-styled ‘Justicious Knight Commander’ come to cauterise Norway of bloody foreigners. He advocated the racial rejuvenation of his homeland through the expulsion of Muslims, and to this end he photographed himself in masonic Crusader regalia, sumptuously gold-braided and primed for holy war. Was he mad?

Italo Calvino, the Italian arch-fabulist, wrote a foreword to this celebrated wartime diary when it appeared in Italy in 1956. (The author displays an ‘ironic modesty’ and ‘simplicity’ in the writing, Calvino wrote approvingly.) The act of keeping an anti-Fascist diary of this sort during the German occupation carried an automatic death penalty. The author, Ada Gobetti, jotted down her entries in a cryptic English that only she could understand; at the war’s end she deciphered the jottings for eventual publication.

Some years ago I met the Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he was staying. A waitress came up to our table. ‘I think, Belinda,’ Mankell said to her suavely, ‘that I would like a glass or two of your red wine!’ Momentarily confused, Belinda asked Mankell to repeat his order. After she had gone, Mankell commented peevishly to me: ‘What’s the matter with her? Was there anybody at home? Hello?’ Clearly, the hoped-for flirtation with Belinda had not come off. More than just the top button of Mankell’s black shirt was undone. Mankell could not have imagined how successful the Inspector Wallander mysteries would be when, 23 years ago, he published the first in the series.

Dad’s Army, the sitcom to end all sitcoms, portrayed the Home Guard as often doddery veterans. In one episode, Private Godfrey’s genteel sisters are seen to prepare their Regency cottage for the feared Hitler invasion. ‘The Germans are coming, Miss Godfrey,’ Lance Corporal Jones warns. ‘Yes I know, so many people to tea,’ she chirrups, adding: ‘I think I’d better make some more.’ In contrast to Godfrey, the sitcom’s street-smart spiv Joe Walker could be relied on to come up with the goods. In his rakish trilby indeed he supplies the platoon with contraband cigarettes and is familiar with the legendary backs of lorries what things fall off of.

A couple of years ago in Jamaica, I met Errol Flynn’s former wife, the screen actress Patrice Wymore. Reportedly a difficult and withdrawn woman, her life in the Caribbean (apart from the few details she cared to volunteer) could only be guessed at. The Errol Flynn estate, an expanse of ranchland outside Port Antonio, was grazed by tired-looking cattle. ‘Haven’t we met before?’ Wymore said to me as I walked into her office after knocking. ‘You remind me of someone I know.’ I took in the riding crops and spurs hanging on the wall. After eight years of marriage, in 1958 Wymore had divorced Flynn, who died the following year at the age of 50 having more or less boozed himself into the grave.

Viv Albertine is deservedly famous as the guitarist of the tumultuous, all-female English punk band The Slits. Their debut album, Cut, released in 1979, combined jangly Captain Beefheart-style guitarwork with reggae rhythms and sardonic social commentary. Ariane ‘Ari Up’ Forster, the vocalist, added an element of wild-child abandon to Tessa Pollitt’s infectiously heavy bass lines. The album is a masterpiece. Albertine’s memoir takes its title from her mother’s routine complaint to her: ‘Clothes, clothes, clothes, music, music, music, boys, boys, boys — that’s all you ever think about!’ Albertine came to Britain from her native Australia in 1958, aged four.

Fifteen minutes by rail from Paddington, Southall is a ‘Little India’ in the borough of Ealing. An ornate Hindu temple there, the Shree Ram, is set back from the beep and brake of traffic on King Street. When I visited, a pooja (prayer meeting) was underway. Incense fumes — a sweet suffocating presence — wafted round statuettes of the blue-skinned Krishna. The priest was surprised to see me: ‘You are coming from — ?’ ‘Paddington.’ ‘But you don’t look particularly Indian.’ ‘I’m not Indian.’ (With his sandalwood caste-mark and Nehru shirt, the priest himself was of Gujarati origin.) Racially diverse, Southall is distinctly out-at-elbow and peeling paint, but bustling all the same.

Jonathan Meades, the architectural, food and cultural commentator, appears on television in a pair of retro shades and a trademark Blues Brother suit. He looks like a poseur, and indeed studied drama at Rada. Lynn Barber, the ‘celebrity interviewer’, is the self-acknowledged scourge of pomposity and pretension. (Melvyn Bragg, among others, has felt the lash of her schoolmarm tongue.) Like Meades, Barber grew up in early 1950s middle-class England. An only child, she found a way out of the bridge/ canasta tea parties and sherry-tippling of Twickenham, her childhood home, to become a staff writer on Penthouse girlie magazine; her first book, published in 1975, was a sex manual entitled How to Improve Your Man in Bed (which, incidentally, my wife has still not read).

In his preface to The Joy of Gay Sex (revised and expanded third edition), Edmund White praises the ‘kinkier’ aspects of homo-erotic life. Practical advice is given on frottage, spanking, sixty-nining, cruising, blowjobs, fisting, rimming and three-ways. Of course, Proust-inspired poetic exaltations to homosexual love have long characterised White’s fiction, from A Boy’s Own Story to Hotel de Dream. Yet White is no mere popinjay in thrall to high-flown campery; his mind is drawn to some very dark places. Between 1983 and 1999, as an ardent Francophile, White elected to live in Paris.

On his deathbed in Dublin in the spring of 1966, Flann O’Brien must have been squiffy from tots of Paddy. A bottle of the amber distillate was smuggled in to the hospital on April Fool’s Day by a couple of well-wishers. O’Brien rang the bell to summon a nurse. ‘Sister,’ he told her solemnly, ‘I have two friends who are constipated and need a dose. Would you bring two glasses?’ Within a matter of hours the poker-faced Count O’Blather (O’Brien’s preferred authorial pseudonym) was dead. Flanneurs everywhere had reason to lament the passing of a notable Dublin wit and a writer of comic genius. But all was not lost.

The Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector was a riddlesome and strange personality. Strikingly beautiful, with catlike green eyes, she died in Rio de Janeiro in 1977 at the age of only 57. Some said she wrote like Virginia Woolf (not necessarily a recommendation) and resembled Marlene Dietrich. She was ‘very, very sexy’, remembered a friend. Yet she needed a great many cigarettes, painkillers, anti-depressants, as well as anti-psychotics and sleeping pills to get through her final years. Lispector had great fortitude over her illness, it was said, and suffered the ravages of ovarian cancer equably and without complaint. According to her biographer Benjamin Moser, Lispector’s was a life fraught with the shadow of past failures and past sorrows.

Leon Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, is a retired chemist in his early eighties. I met him not long ago in the house in Mexico City where his grandfather was murdered in 1940 with an ice-pick. Volkov had grown up in that house surrounded by 20-foot garden walls and watchtowers with slits in them for machine-guns. The protection was no defence against Trotsky’s eventual assassin, the Spanish-born Stalinist Ramón Mercader, who very ably infiltrated Trotsky’s Mexico circle and, on 20 August, struck the revolutionary on the front of his head with that gruesome weapon. Trotsky bellowed in pain but managed to fend off his assailant before collapsing. His bodyguards hurried in and beat off the intruder; Trotsky was rushed to hospital, where he died the following day.

Carlos Acosta, the greatest dancer of his generation, grew up in Havana as the youngest of 11 black children. Money was tight, but Carlos won a place at ballet school, and before long he was enthralling audiences at Covent Garden as a half Jagger, half Nureyev figure with a twist of the moon-walking Jackson in the mix. Now Acosta is about to leap into the world of literature with a debut novel, Pig’s Foot, written over a period of four years during rehearsal breaks. For all its manifest debt to Latin American so-called ‘magic realists’ (Marquez, Borges, Vargas Llosa), the novel stands triumphantly on its own. In pages of salty-sweetprose, it traces five generations of a black family through Cuba’s tumultuous recent history.

The Japanese are sometimes said to suffer from ‘outsider person shock’ (gaijin shokku) when travelling abroad. Recently in London we had a lodger from Hiroshima who wanted to practise his karate routines in our back garden. Concerned to see him chopping at our apple tree in full combat gear, a metropolitan police helicopter hovered in close to take a look. Afterwards Mr Kinoto admitted to me that he was lost in London amid alien signs and habits. ‘The object of my time in England is not sightseeing’, he told me ruefully, ‘but home-staying.’ I thought of the Japanese lodger while reading Italo Calvino’s wonderful essays, Collection of Sand, published in Italy in 1984, a year before Calvino died at the age of only 62.