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| McCain aides kept me bottled up, says Sarah Palin in new book Republican vice-presidential candidate claims in Going Rogue that she was kept away from reporters against her wishesThe Sarah Palin bandwagon has begun to roll with the first clues to the contents of her multimillion-dollar book, Going Rogue, emerging ahead of its publication next Tuesday.But judging from the first peeks inside the book's 413 pages, the $5m reported to have been paid for it by HarperCollins has bought few astonishing revelations. Rather, Going Rogue contains confirmation of what we already knew: her fraught relations during last year's presidential campaign with the Republican candidate John McCain, her dismay at her disastrous television interview with Katie Couric of CBS, and her belief in the importance of family, faith and country.The sneak preview has been given by Associated Press which says that, despite tight security, it managed to buy a copy of the book on Thursday.According to AP, Palin is frank about her frosty relations with the McCain campaign and critical of how they handled her during the climax of the presidential race. She said McCain aides kept her "bottled up" from reporters against her wishes.They also refused to let her rewrite the public statement that was given after the pregnancy of her teenage daughter Bristol was announced just days after her own nomination as vice-presidential candidate. She wanted to take a tone that was less glamorising of the pregnancy.Going Rogue has already received the kind of hype normally reserved for the memoirs of former presidents or film stars. It has been in the top of the bestselling lists on Amazon and other internet bookshops for weeks, and the initial print run is of 1.5m copies.According to AP, Palin writes that she decided to grant the fateful interview with Couric only after she was persuaded to do so by a McCain aide, Nicolle Wallace, who said that Couric suffered from low self-esteem and would see it as a favour.In fact, Couric turned out to be "badgering" and "biased" and condescending, Palin writes.The decibel level of the Palin show, which takes to the road in Michigan next Thursday at the start of a nationwide tour, rose a further notch yesterday when extracts of a forthcoming interview with Oprah Winfrey were put out. In it, Palin addresses the vexed subject of Levi Johnston, the father of her grandson, Tripp.She tells Winfrey that despite conflict between Johnston and the Palin family, she regards him as "part of the family and you want to bring him in the fold and kind of under your wing. I think he needs to know that he is loved and he has the most beautiful child and this can all work out for good. It really can."Johnston, meanwhile, is leading his own celebrity bandwagon, apparently timed to coincide, and clash, with that of the woman who almost became his mother-in-law.In a series of comments, most recently to the Guardian, he has disparaged Palin's treatment towards him and cast aspersions on her projected image as a homespun hockey mum.Sarah PalinUS politicsUnited StatesEd Pilkingtonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Ruth Padel: 'I rush into things … I'm full of self-doubt' Nine days after becoming the first female professor of poetry at Oxford, Ruth Padel resigned when it was revealed she had sent emails bad-mouthing a rival. Now the poet gives her first interview since the controversyRuth Padel's rooms in Christ's College, Cambridge are on a staircase just along the quad from those once occupied by her great-great-grandfather. The doorway retains his name, C Darwin, as though he were still an undergraduate. The author of On the Origin of Species came here in 1829, in relieved retreat from Edinburgh and the medical school his father so wanted him to attend, and he so hated. Although he was technically and, in hindsight, somewhat ironically studying divinity, it was here that he met the professors who recommended him for a journey in the tropics, on the HMS Beagle.One suspects that Padel, too, sees the age-blurred wooden doorway as the entrance to a refuge – from the hugger-mugger shoppers in the road outside, perhaps, but more from the headlines and unwonted notoriety that followed her election, last May, as the first woman professor of poetry at Oxford. She was in the post for nine days before she resigned, after it emerged that she had sent emails tipping journalists off to episodes of sexual indiscretion in the earlier academic life of her only serious rival, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.Dossiers containing photocopies detailing these indiscretions were also sent to various Oxford academics, by persons unknown; Walcott withdrew his candidacy and she continued her campaign opposed only by a much less well-known poet, Krishna Mehrota. It was not exactly a survival of the fittest, and no one came out of that episode well – not Padel, not Walcott, not the male commentators (Melvyn Bragg, AC Grayling) bleating on their high ground, not the women who blamed it all on misogyny (Jeanette Winterson, for example, dismissing Oxford as "a sexist little dump").In this, her first interview since her resignation, Padel perches on the edge of an armchair, slight, brittle and wary. The warmth in her voice, a certain instinct for coquettishness, feels clipped and self-doubting. Even when she is defending herself – which she does with gushing niceties about anything and everything, except, often, the subject at hand: Christ's is wonderful, the growth of poetry festivals in the last decade is wonderful; Seamus Heaney writes wonderfully – there is something disconcertingly undefended about her too.The rooms, which she has inherited from the intellectual historian Quentin Skinner (she is here for a year on a Leverhulme fellowship, with a brief to bring poetry to anyone in the college who wants it, from students to porters to professors) make up for their bare chill with a top-floor view, of dormers, of clear East Anglian sky, of, as she puts in Darwin: A Life in Poems, a "jade lawn, scarlet geraniums / and black stone walls (now cleaned and pale)". She enjoys the trappings. Black academic gowns envelop the back of the door. Bottles of sherry, which she offers to workshop students, perch on the sink. On a coffee table are high piles of paper – a fraction of the 10,500 poems she has to read as a judge for this year's national poetry competition (she is a previous winner); on another table, a box of holistic croquettes for adult dogs, and a copy of her Darwin book, which has just been shortlisted for a Costa.Darwin: A Life in Poems grew out of commissions, and was, in the end, written very quickly, in four months. "If I'd been doing it for four years the poems would be much, much better crafted – but I would also be much, much more scared. It seems to me now a very impudent thing to do, to bring his voice into mine and so on." She'd have missed the bicentenary, too. As it is, she has cashed in: she has been in such demand to read from the book that she has been in danger of damaging her voice.Much of the book uses the naturalist's own words, from his diaries on the Beagle, and his autobiography, slightly rearranged. The effect is initially rather flat-footed, but when Padel gets stuck into the private tensions of Darwin's life – the religious belief of his wife Emma versus his own growing atheism; Emma's multiple pregnancies; the loss of his 10-year-old favourite daughter Annie; his decades-long illness – the poetry becomes much more absorbing, even moving. Padel's own dense style takes flight in the tropics : "Leaves of all textures that a leaf / could be: palm, fluff, prickle, matte and plume; /bobbled; shaggy plush. A thousand shades/ of ochre, silver, emerald, smoky brass."Padel was aware of the Darwin family connection early – if only because she was so fond of her grandmother, Nora Barlow, who edited many of Darwin's books, and whose home was full of books about the natural world. From Barlow and her own mother she absorbed a habit of looking at, for example, "the sepals of a flower. How it was made or how it changed. Or a peregrine that came into the garden". But it was only when she came to write a non-fiction book about tigers, she says, that she made the connection publicly explicit.Tigers in Red Weather began out of another escape – from a failing relationship, this time, and to Kerala – but became a kind of hunt, for tiger habitat. Though more at home in the city (she was born in an attic on Wimpole Street, London) she spent two years walking through jungle, kayaking, on one nervous occasion, down a river in Laos, or climbing up a Sumatran volcano to get to the ridge to which the tigers, threatened by logging, had retreated. "We were following the ridge trail, in absolutely pristine rainforest, and we went off the trail and sat down. There were some monkeys overhead, muttering around, and then they stopped. And the whole forest fell quiet. And then" – her voice drops to a dramatic whisper – "you just felt there was a presence there. And then in the silence a twig snapped, and there was a slight cough, and we just held our breath – and then it seemed to go away. Everything in the forest changed, and seemed to come back to life. And my guide, who knew that forest very well, sort of smiled and got up, and I said, 'What was that?' And she said, 'Well, I don't know – but you feel the forest go still when there's something large around, usually a predator. It could have been a golden cat, it could have been a bear, but those monkeys wouldn't have been scared of a bear.' We came out on the trail. I turned, and there was the print of my trainer, and superimposed on that a huge tiger footmark. The tiger had just seen us, clocked us, waited around a bit, and gone on his way. And that was really amazing."It was a far cry from her previous life, as an academic specialising in Greek tragedy at Wadham College, Oxford, where she was the first woman to be given a research fellowship. "Being a woman in what had been a male preserve meant that you could be more relaxed," she says. "You weren't bound by the conventions. And so if it wasn't normal for people to ask about each other's work, that was fine for me, because I was a girl, and a research fellow, and came from outside." She spent a research year in Paris and Crete, where she helped excavate at Knossos and learned modern Greek; seven years finishing a PhD ("that wouldn't be allowed now"). Later she taught at Birkbeck in London.This background, combined with her omnivorous musicianship, has made her poetry strikingly literate – but also aware that poets are operating in a changed world. "Up to the end of the 19th century, the bulk of people who read poems had mostly the same education, the same basic things in their head – and so you could make allusion to them. You can't do that now, so how do you put information in that you want to talk about, without, as it were, overloading the poem?" And so her poems are stuffed not just with lines that owe their rhythm to ancient Greek choruses, but with references to Darth Vader, Sainsbury's and Iggy Pop; Issey Miyake and Pushkin. Darwin: A Life in Poems prints, next to each poem, a gloss of context and dates; the structural allusion is to Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, but you don't have to know that to find them useful.In a dispiriting anticipation of Lord Mandelson's current demands that university courses prove their economic usefulness, classics departments began to be reshaped by the Thatcher government's requirement for relevance, and Padel left, finally, to write full-time, first in Crete, and then in Cambridge, where her husband was a professor of ancient philosophy – she wasn't published, as a poet, until she was 37; her daughter was born two years later. Having a baby, rather than limiting her, seems to have freed her. "Absolutely. It puts the skids under you. In the time when she's asleep you can get a poem done. It makes you much, much more conscious of your use of time." But it wasn't until her third collection (by which time she had moved to London, and separated from her husband) that she came into her own, with long poems, intricately structured, recklessly explicit about a love affair with an attached man that would be played out, eventually, over three consecutive books; she has been shortlisted three times for the key affiliate prize and once before for the Costa (then called the Whitbread).I remind her that she once wrote a piece about how many poets seemed to write out of psychological damage – is that true of her? "I'm sure … I think we are all damaged – let's rephrase that. I think that one thing it's useful to have as a poet is a few less layers of skin, and being open to vulnerability. I think maybe when you write less well it's because you're being less vulnerable." It's a rather hoary Romantic ideal, but it raises the stakes, certainly. "When you write a poem, and you want people to like it and react to it, it's about your inwardness being valued. And that's why it's so important, that's why it can be so divisive, that's why people are so passionate about it." What would her particular vulnerabilities be? "I think I'm quite naive. I think I rush into things without thinking. And I am full of self-doubt all the time."More revealing is the way she describes suggestions, a year ago, that she be considered for the post of poet laureate. ("I would like to start a steady, syncopated drumbeat for Ruth Padel as the next laureate," wrote Bel Mooney in a letter to the Observer, describing Padel's achievements, then, betraying the embattled elitism of a small world, "she would bring vivacity to the ancient honour, as well as being tough-minded enough to withstand the philistines.")"I always said I didn't want to do the laureate," says Padel, "because I was too scared of the post getting in the way of work. I thought there were some poets, and Carol Ann [Duffy]'s one, who wouldn't let it do that, but there are some who would, and I was probably one of them. What I know about myself is that I always want to please – I want to give people what they want. And if you have lots and lots of people asking you for things you get very scattered, and I'm sure Carol Ann is strong enough to be absolutely clear about her priorities, but" – her voice is very quiet now – "I'm not sure that I would be able to do that."Is that what happened with the Oxford job? I am referring, she knows, to the misguided emails to journalists. Her voice drops even further. "That may be." I can see how it would work – the thrill of being in the running for such a prestigious job, the flattery of being asked for information, the frisson of having a nugget of gossip she could provide, the wish to please a student (as she later, slightly unbelievably described it, after her resignation) who was concerned about a man with Walcott's supposed reputation being given a teaching post. Still unsolved, however, is the mystery of who sent the dossier – "I have no idea – whoever it was was no friend to me, but it's water under the bridge now."She has, understandably, no wish to revisit the episode, but she seems to struggle, a bit, with her newfound media training-by-fire: her instinct seems to be to answer a question directly put; experience tells her it would probably be a bad idea, the two imperatives keep flashing across her face. Did she want the job very much? "I don't really know. I didn't expect to get it. I would have loved to do what I'm doing now, which is taking poetry into the science labs, going round college to college. I would have found the lectures daunting, but I would have enjoyed the challenge of them. So I don't know – it became … I'd never been part of a campaign before, and other people …"The day before she resigned she was having lunch with "some old friends, and one is an artist, and the other is an actor. And they were talking about their work, and it was so interesting. And I thought, 'This is my life. I like talking about work, thinking about work, and where I am and what I'm doing.'"Is there anything she regrets? "I think I should talk less." She laughs. How about the emails? "Do we need to talk about this really?, because it'll just be picked up by other papers. I mean, I wrote things in response to people who asked me about things. And I think that's probably all I will say."Poetry not being a paying sort of job, she's made a complementary living from journalism for years. Could she not guess it would be picked up like that? "Um … no, I didn't. I didn't have any idea." What has she learned from the whole thing? The answer to this is a lot less hesitant. "Not to trust people. And also to breathe more deeply before I answered things. And um …." – very quietly – "it was a very important moment when I realised, with those friends of mine, I love doing my work, what I love is doing my work. I don't care about the high-profile stuff – of course I care about the service of poetry, but I would have liked to do the work. But now I want to get back my writing – that's the important thing." Quite.Darwin: A Life In Poems is published by Chatto & Windus. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846Ruth PadelDerek WalcottOxford professor of poetryUniversity of OxfordPoetryAida Edemariamguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
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The forgotten genius? Leo Tolstoy is widely considered in the west to be the greatest writer of all time and this year sees the release of a film, The Last Station, to mark the centenary of his death. So why is his native Russia lukewarm about the literary genius?For Tolstoy fans, 2010 is set to be a wonderful year. One hundred years after the great Russian novelist fled from his country estate outside Moscow – dying three weeks later in a small provincial railway station – the world is gearing up to celebrate him. In Germany and the US there are fresh translations of Anna Karenina; in Cuba and Mexico Tolstoy bookfairs; worldwide, a new black- and-white documentary. Dug up from Russia's archives and restored, the  original cinema footage shows an elderly Tolstoy playing with his poodles and vaulting energetically on his horse.Next month also sees the UK premiere of The Last Station, an accomplished new drama about Tolstoy's final days. Starring Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer and James McAvoy, this witty biopic recounts the eventful last two years of his life. Under siege from fin de siècle paparazzi, Count Tolstoy and his wife Sofya Andreevna squabble over his literary estate. Tolstoy wants to leave the copyright to humanity; the countess wants the revenues herself. Tired of marital conflict, Tolstoy runs away, then falls ill and dies on his train journey south.Based on the novel by Jay Parini, the film's central figure is Tolstoy's young private secretary, Valentin Bulgakov (McAvoy). During his later years, the novelist rejected property and fleshly pleasures, but Bulgakov's vow of Tolstoyan celibacy proves predictably short-lived: an attractive Tolstoy commune-member, Masha, relieves him of his virginity. There are strong performances from Mirren, Plummer and McAvoy, and the screenplay is pleasingly deft. Asked by Mrs Tolstoy whether he has read War and Peace, Bulgakov stammeringly replies: "Many times." There is a pause. He then concedes: "Well, twice."One country, however, has so far conspicuously failed to share in this global Tolstoy mania – Russia. Rumour has it that Vladimir Putin toured Tolstoy's country estate incognito as a young KGB spy, but so far the Kremlin is not planning any major event to mark the centenary of Tolstoy's death on 20 November. Not only that, but the makers of The Last Station ended up shooting the film not among the birch trees and northern skylines of Tolstoy's Russia, but in the somewhat more genteel surroundings of rustic eastern Germany.The movie's American director, Michael Hoffman, had intended to film The Last Station in Yasnaya Polyana, or Clear Glade, Tolstoy's pastoral family estate near Tula, 125 miles south of Moscow. "We wanted to do it in Russia, we really did," Andrei Deryabin, the film's co-producer, explains somewhat wistfully. "But there were no decent loos. There wasn't the infrastructure. The hotels were lousy. Nor were there any security guarantees for the actors. In the end, filming in Russia proved far too expensive."According to Deryabin, there was also a more profound obstacle – Russia's surprising indifference to the genius behind War and Peace, Tolstoy's contrapuntal saga set during the years of Napoleon's wars in Europe and his invasion of Russia.In the west, Tolstoy is generally rated as the greatest literary novelist: last July, Newsweek placed War and Peace at the top of its meta-list of 100 great novels. (Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four snuck in second, with Joyce's Ulysses third.) Critics hail the extraordinary psychology of Tolstoy's characters, and veterans say nobody has written better about battle. And the east, especially Japan, reveres Tolstoy's philosophy. "Across the whole world there is a huge Tolstoy boom. He's esteemed everywhere apart from here [in Russia]," Deryabin admits.Russia's scant regard is connected to its own troubled existential journey, Deryabin suggests, and its failure to discover a national idea. "We have been searching for it for long time. In fact, the answer is the one given by Tolstoy: the task before humanity is to be happy now."Deryabin concedes that, for most Russians, the previous century was pretty awful – in other words, more Dostoevskyan than Tolstoyan. "The last century, with its emphasis on darkness and suffering, was Dostoevsky's. Now I hope it's Tolstoy's turn," he says.The writer's great-great grandson, Vladimir Ilyich Tolstoy, agrees that Russia's painful 20th century had a distinctly Dostoevskyan tone. "I hope the 21st century is Tolstoyan," he says. Vladimir is the director of the state literary museum at Yasnaya Polyana. With his sweeping Tolstoyan forehead, he is instantly recognisable as a member of the distinguished Tolstoy clan."Dostoevsky focuses his attention on painful problems, on the dark side of the human soul. Tolstoy is the opposite. He defends fundamental values such as love, friendship and family relations. He gives positive answers to the questions mankind is asking. In this sense he gives more hope," Vladimir says.He has transformed Yasnaya into Russia's leading cultural attraction. Thousands of curious literary pilgrims visit each year. Many of them arrive on special Saturday and Sunday trains from Moscow, the Tolstoy Express. The train is festively decorated with scenes from Tolstoy's writings; I travelled in a cosy carriage devoted to his years in the Caucasus – a period that provided Tolstoy with the inspiration for several works, including his astonishing late novella Hadji Murad, but which his diaries reveal as a period of gambling and "girls". There is, naturally enough, a War and Peace carriage.From Kozlova Zaseka station, a cranky old bus takes you up to Tolstoy's house. Everything is much at it was in his time: in the classical creeper-covered manor, you can peer at the black leather sofa on which the author and his 13 children were born. There is the stoopingly low chair from which he wrote; and an ornamental gold dog Tolstoy slept with under his pillow as a boy. In a limpid dining room are portraits of Tolstoy and his family by the painter Repin; round the corner is his 22,000-volume library; in the woods is his unmarked oblong grave.Reverential tour guides escort small groups past Count Tolstoy's duck pond and up an avenue of high trees. There is an apple orchard; geese wander among the farm buildings; you can strike off into the birch woods where Tolstoy hunted hares and foxes and shot at woodcocks. In general, he missed.The nearby village where Tolstoy tried to educate peasant children in the 1860s still exists – now, as then, something of a dump; yet so evocative is the atmosphere that it wouldn't be surprising if Tolstoy himself burst from the lime trees wearing his peasant smock. (In Russian, of course, he isn't Leo but Lev, or Lev Nikolaevich – with the stress in Russian on the second syllable of Tolstoy.)According to Vladimir, the number of tourists visiting Yasnaya Polyana has increased over the past 15 years – many of them foreigners. There is also a growing interest in the life and diary of Sofya Andreevna, who worked as Tolstoy's literary amanuensis.Vladimir says he was agreeably surprised at The Last Station, a German- Russian co-production with an almost entirely British cast (Plummer, who plays Tolstoy, is Canadian). Vladimir's daughter Anastasia – currently a post-graduate student at Oxford – appears as an extra in Tolstoy's death scene. Hoffman picked her because of her Russian face; it has to be said, however, that some of the other peasant extras appear rather too Germanically well-fed."I liked the film," Vladimir says. "The actors are perfect. And the music is beautiful. It's terribly difficult to make a movie about the last years of his life; you have to be very precise and delicate. Helen Mirren doesn't resemble Sofya at all, but her performance is brilliant." Some Russians, however, have balked at Mirren's unapologetically Anglophone pronunciation of Russian family names. "It's a bit odd to hear her say 'Valentin Fiodorovich'," the film critic Andrei Plakhov noted in Kommersant newspaper.Like Deryabin, Vladimir Tolstoy admits that his ancestor's reputation is higher in the west than in Russia. This, he says, is due to the political upheaval in Russia since the break-up of the Soviet Union, and the contemporary emphasis on visual, rather than intellectual, culture. Russia's book-reading, scientific middle class has also shrunk compared to communist times.The Kremlin, meanwhile, shows little interest in Russia's most celebrated novelist. Putin has never mentioned Tolstoy in his speeches. And the writer's criticisms of Orthodox religion and authority make him a dangerous figure for those in power – both in Tsarist Russia and also today, Vladimir believes. "Nobody is trying to throw out the idea that he is the author of great novels. But they [official Russia] don't know what to do with his views," he says.Tolstoy's lingering feud with Russia's Orthodox church is part of the problem. The church excommunicated him in 1901, unhappy with his novel Resurrection and Tolstoy's espousal of Christian anarchist and pacifist views. In 2001, the church reaffirmed Tolstoy's excommunication, and conservative Russian Orthodox thinkers have even placed Tolstoy's works on a blacklist.Others whisper that Tolstoy's beliefs make him un-Russian. They also moan about his unwieldy syntax. And it is hard to imagine that Tolstoy would have kind things to say in return about Putin's bureaucratic-authoritarian state, in which black-robed priests wearing clunky gold crosses appear on pro-Kremlin talkshows."I feel that Leo Tolstoy needs to be defended. We need to support him morally, intellectually and emotionally," says Ludmilla Saraskina, Russia's foremost expert on Dostoevsky, and an acclaimed scholar of 19th-century Russian literature. She adds that the writer is under attack in modern-day Russia from the same reactionary forces he himself criticised – the state, the army and the church. "He's not in fashion," she says.Saraskina is one of several dozen academics who will defiantly take part this summer in a Tolstoy centenary conference at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy's 100-plus direct descendants are also turning up for a big family party.Some believe the reason Tolstoy has fallen out of fashion in Russia is the fact that every Russian child has to read him at school (one Russian journalist attending a press conference on Tolstoy confessed to me that she had been "overstuffed" with his work while a teenager). In Soviet times, Lenin's view of Tolstoy prevailed: that his indictment of Tsarism made him a prophet of revolution. These days, all Russian 15-year-olds study War and Peace as part of their national curriculum. In theory, the girls are supposed to like the love scenes, with the boys captivated by the battle stuff.In fact, girls at Moscow's state secondary school 1,275 take an intriguingly unforgiving attitude to Natasha Rostova, Tolstoy's heroine. In particular, they dislike Natasha's decision to dump her fiance, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, in favour of the snake-like Anatole Kuragin. (To be fair, Prince Andrei has gone away for a year, and she is unaware that Kuragin is already married.) "I don't like the way she cheated on Prince Andrei. I can't forgive her for that," Vera Sinotina, aged 17, explains.The girls say they like the details of aristocratic life in War and Peace, a world away from the vulgar behaviour of Russia's present elite, but it's clear that they admire other Russian authors – especially Dostoevsky and Mikhail Bulgakov – a bit more. "It's criminal that Russian kids have to read Tolstoy aged 14 and 15. They should read him much later," says Sergei Yevtushenko, who composed the much-acclaimed soundtrack for The Last Station while in London.Oddly, the only country where The Last Station has yet to secure a cinema distribution deal is Russia. Deryabin is also working on a second film, Leo Tolstoy: Genius Alive, which will be shown on 20 November, 2010, the day that Tolstoy died of pneumonia at Astapovo station aged 82 – an event that triggered mourning across Russia and the world.The 72-minute feature documentary is made up of rare black-and-white cinema footage of Tolstoy, shot at Yasnaya in 1908. It brings the sage of Yasnaya vividly back to life: Tolstoy can be seen getting on a train, scuttling off into the woods, and handing out alms to the poor – a long, wispy-bearded figure who looks very much like a living saint.Meanwhile in a scene from The Last Station, Countess Tolstoy turns to her guests, seated around a table in the garden, and exclaims: "You all think he's Christ, don't you? Well, he's not."Leo TolstoyRussiaLuke Hardingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Book roundup: Weather the winter with a picture book For kids, at least those in colder climes, winter is the season for outdoor adventures in snow and on ice. rssfeeds.usatoday.com |