Feliks topolski autobiography in five short
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Tory Heaven
WITH A PREFACE BY DAVID KYNASTON
216pp
ISBN 9781910263181
Tory Heaven (1948) was Marghanita Laski's third book, another satire after both Love on the Super Tax and To Bed with Grand Music. The plotis as follows: five people return to England in August 1945 after having spent several years on a desert island (cue the 1946 Miss Ranskill Comes Home. As they approach England ‘our hero’ James Leigh-Smith (think Jacob Rees-Mogg) prays, ‘“God, let it be as it might have been. Alter the clock, fix the election, do it any way you please, but let me see the England of all decent Conservatives’ dreams.” He raised an anguished face to the heavens and at that moment a loud clap of thunder was heard over his right shoulder.’ His prayer has been answered.
When they arrive at the port it takes him quite a while to work out what is going on. But the nub of it is that ‘the whole population has been formally divided into the five classes that it naturally comprises. He is an A; ‘the B’s represent the middle classes’; C’s are the servants of A’s. They are people who’ve chosen to wait on A’s just to be in touch with them – waiters, hairdressers, butlers, housekeepers, and agricultural workers on big estates.’ D’s are Trade Unionists (‘don’t you have a lot of stri
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Our colleague, Claudia is back with her monthly blog post about our special Biographies Collection at Kensington Central Library. Over to Claudia to tell us more –
During April we are having two displays of books from our special Biographies Collection. The first is to complement the wonderful exhibition provided for us by the Pilecki Institute: ‘Passports for Life’. This exhibition tells the fascinating story of The Ładoś Group – Polish diplomats who were involved in a rescue operation to help Jews escape the Nazis during the Holocaust. This exhibition of photographs, original documents and audio-visual displays will be on the ground floor of Kensington Central Library until Tuesday 31 May.
To give an insight into the contribution of Polish Jews to twentieth century culture before the Holocaust, we are displaying biographies of some leading literary, artistic and scientific figures including Sholem Asch, Feliks Topolski, Marie Rambert and Leopold Infeld.
The leading figure in Yiddish language literature to date, and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1978, was Warsaw-born Isaac Bashevis Singer. No one documented the Polish-Jewish world with the detail, vigour and beauty that he did, and we have several wonderful books about him, alongside many of his be
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Feliks Topolski: Vision Witness cause problems the 20th Century
Delivered provoke Daniel Topolski
22/3/2010
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