Parallel Lives

The slow train from Milan to Turin enabled me to finish Iain Pears’s moving description of the love affair between Francis Haskell, who comes across as a surprisingly nerve wracked academic, afflicted by all sorts of doubts about his sexuality and author of sixty volumes of diary held by the National Gallery, and Larissa Haskell, the charming, highly intelligent, assistant curator of drawings at the Hermitage Museum who had endured terrible privations during the Siege of Leningrad which she survived much more easily than he had the torture of Eton. 

I would have liked a little bit more about the milieu of King’s College, Cambridge as it was in the 1950s, but it gives a good sense of the nature of European museum and research culture at the time and a relationship of shared intellectual values across national borders.

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5 thoughts on “Parallel Lives”

  1. Ivan Gaskell's avatar Ivan Gaskell says:

    Hi Charles–

    I greatly look forward to reading Parallel Lives but it’s not published in the USA until August. I knew Francis and Larissa fairly well having been taught by Francis in the 1970s. He kept an eye on me thereafter having me to dinner in their stuffed Jericho house from time to time. The last time I saw Larissa was when I called on her with Francis’s wonderful former D.Phil. student, Cao Yiqiang after Francis’s death. Yiqiang was devoted to them both and would always visit when he was over from China.

    –Ivan

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  2. Tony Valsamidis's avatar Tony Valsamidis says:

    I seem to recall Anthony Blunt stayed with Haskell when he was in a spot of bother. I didn’t know him personally, but he always seemed like a very animated presence in college when I was an undergraduate.

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