Archive
The articles, reviews and broadcast talks listed here do not comprise a comprehensive list. Shorter reviews are omitted. Please contact the author with specific inquiries.
Short Stories
‘Lighten our Darkness’ Standpoint December 2013
Broadcasting
For BBC Radio 3, in the ‘Twenty Minutes’ slot:
Brahms and Freud, October 9, 2014
Brahms and Nature, October 7, 2014
The Albertopolis of the South [on Prince Albert and musical culture in London] August 26, 2013
This Country called Russia: The story of the Red Princess, Sofka Skipwith August 13, 2013
The German William Morris October 3, 2012
A Russian Bloomsbury, 6 August 2011
Gallery-Going, 7 August, 2011
The Children of the Russian Revolution, July 30, 2010
On Goncharov’s novel Oblomov, September 1, 2009
Also for Radio 3, in the weekly series The Essay,
– four talks on ’Death and the Philosopher’, first broadcast April 30-May 3, 2007 and repeated January 2008
– an essay in the series From Russia with Love, first broadcast 28 October,2008.
– and talking about Mahler’s 2nd symphony and its German settings on Discovering Music May 15, 2011
All these broadcasts are archived on the BBC i-Player Radio website.
Other ’Twenty-Minutes’ Talks (not yet archived but keep trying)
’How She Brought the Novel from Moscow to London’ [On Constance Garnett, translator of the Russian Classics], Twenty-Minutes, BBC Radio 3, May 12, 2006
‘Shostakovich and Football’ BBC Radio 3, February 23, 2006
’The Polishness of Chopin’ May 9, 2005
‘Strange Meeting’ [On the Life of Victor Frank] 2003
‘Boris Godunov and the Story of Uglich’ August 2002
‘St Petersburg’ June 8, 1999
‘Gogol’ February 19, 1998
45-Minute Features
‘Listening to the War’ The Archive Hour, September 20, 2003
‘Expel all the Philosophers’, December 15, 2002
‘To Sleep, To Dream’ [Talk on Freud and The Interpretation of Dreams] October 24, 1999
For Radio 4
Talking about ‘Radical Cookbooks’ and Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook on The Food Programme 7 July, 2008
‘Don’t Forget Communism’, The Saturday Essay, Today Programme, August 1, 1998
‘Food and Art’ The Food Programme December 13, 1993
Lectures and Talks
‘Shakespeare, Wagner and Modernism’, KiSS Shakespeare Seminar, The Rose Theatre, Kingston, January 8,2015
‘Clarifying the Enlightenment’, University of Durham, Trevelyan College, March 4, 2014
‘Roman Jakobson and the Experience of Exile’ Cortauld Institute, London, November 2012.
Talk on The Philosophy Steamer at The Pushkin Club, 5A Bloomsbury Square, London WC1 1900 for 1930, Tuesday 28 November, 2006
Panel member, ’The Battle for the Future’, at The Battle of Ideas organised by The Institute of Ideas, The Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU, 28-29 October, 2006
Edinburgh Book Festival August 24, 2006 ’What is an Intellectual?’ Lesley Chamberlain and Stefan Collini
May 17,2006 Panel discussion on ’What Makes Ideas Stick?’ at the Bristol Festival of Ideas
Talk on ’The Philosophy Steamer ’at The French Institute, Edinburgh, in conjunction with the Scotland-Russia Forum , March 16, 2006
[On Russian Philosophy] Edinburgh Book Festival August 2004
[On the Czech Freud], Czech Centre, London, February 2001
[On Freud] The Austrian Cultural Forum, London 2000
‘Van Gogh’s Shoes’ National Gallery May 24, 2000
‘Freud and Religion’ The Voice Box, Festival Hall, London, February 2000
[Nietzsche] Sarah Lawrence Liberal Arts College, New York State, November 1999
[Nietzsche] Chicago Arts Festival October 1998
Talks on Russian Philosophy were also given 2002-5 under the auspices of The Forum for European Philosophy, Philosophy for All and The Rationalist Society.
Articles and Reviews
For most recent articles and reviews please see the websites of The TLS, Standpoint and The New Statesman.
Literature
‘Conflicted Resolution’ [Hubert Mingarelli A Meal in Winter; Otto de Kat News from Berlin] TLS March 12, 2014
‘The Poisoned Madeleine’ [Anya von Bremzen Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking] TLS December 20,2013
Robert Harris An Officer and a Spy, TLS, November 8, 2013
‘Knitting for Britain’ [Alison Macleod Unexploded] TLS, September 13, 2013
A new biography of Derrida by Benoit Peters New Statesman December 15, 2012
‘Enemies of Bliss’ [On Nabokov’s first play] TLS August 3, 2012
[C.P. Snow and Russia’ TLS 2011
’Dostoevsky’s Democracy’ [review] TLS 2009
Ivan Goncharov Oblomov in a new translation by Marion Schwarz [review] TLS 2009
’A lover in Les Sables’ [artlcle on Lenin and Inessa Armand] TLS July 2009
Thomas Keneally The People’s Train [review] New Statesman Oct 8, 2009
Hans Mangnani Utopia or Auschwitz [review] Nov 19, 2009
[On Joseph Conrad] ’Revolution Reproached – Conrad’s morality and Russia’, TLS, March 9,2007
[On Georges Simenon] Prospect, October 2006
Review ofMarta Petreu An Infamous Past- E.M. Cioran, TLS October 13, 2006
[Review of Michel Palmier Weimar in Exile] The Indpendent, August 25, 2006
[Review of Lou Andreas-Salome The Human Family] TLS, July 7, 2006
’A Shoe Story: Derrida, Postmodernism and the Holocaust’ Jewish Quarterly Summer 2006
[Review of Tom Bissell God Lives in St Petersburg]The Independent, June 14, 2006
[Review of Sigmund Krzhizhanovsky 7 Stories] The Independent, May 15, 2006
[Review of Isaiah Berlin’s Letters to Andrzej Walicki TLS, March 10, 2006]
[Review of Olga Grushin The Dream Life of Sukhanov] The Independent, February 3,2006
[Review of books on Akhmatova] ‘Grief Like Ours’ TLS, September 16, 2005
[On the poetry of Cyprian Norwid] ‘Relaxation with Ashes’ TLS, July 29,2005
[On Olivia Manning] ‘Stuck in the Balkans’ TLS, December 24, 2004
[On Martha Freud] ‘The Well-Adjusted Wife’, TLS August 8, 2003
[On Thomas Mann] ‘An Incredible Shrunken Mann for Our Times’ The Independent January 9, 2003
[essay on Thomas Brasch] Jewish Quarterly Spring 2002
[On Antal Szerb Journey By Moonlight] Los Angeles Times Book Review April 14, 2002
[On Primo Levi] ‘Torments of a Guide to Hell’, The Independent March 23, 2002
[essay on Walter Benjamin] Letter from Port-Bou, TLS, February 9, 2001
[essay on Ivy Compton-Burnett]Los Angeles Times Book Review June 10,2001
[essay on the Czech Freud] Jewish Quarterly Winter 2000
[On Freud] ‘A Decameron of Dreams’ [Review of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams tr. Joyce Crick] TLS, May 5, 2000
[On Nietzsche] ‘Ecce Nietzsche’ Los Angeles Times Book Review August 20,2000
[On Sidonie Nadherna and Karl Kraus] ‘Letter from Janovice’ TLS, July 30, 1999
[On Lou Salome] ‘Rilke’s Muse and Freud’s?’ [review of Stephane Michaud Lou Andreas Salome], TLS, October 20,2000
[On Iris Murdoch] ‘Too Much Plato’ Prospect February 1998
[On Christa Wolf] States of Disillusion’ The Independent April 20, 1998
[On Women Writers] ‘Just Like a Woman’ Prospect June 1997
‘The Right Attitude to Horses’ [essay on the horse in Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Mayakovsky, Conrad, Kundera et al.], TLS, March 1,1996
[On Nabokov] ‘Lolita is no apologia for paedophiles’ The Times July 1996
‘Why Nietzsche banished Wagner’ TLS November 4, 1994
[On Jaan Kross] ‘A Noble Battle for Truth’ [Review of The Czar’s Madman] The Times December 31, 1992
[On Ivan Klima] ‘Keeping Busy on the Precipice’ [Review of My Golden Trades],The Times October 1, 1992
[On Rilke] ‘Lover of Solitude’ [Review of Letters to Merline] TLS, June 29, 1990
[On Nina Berberova] ‘The End of a Dream’ TLS, July 20, 1990
‘Desired Objects’ [Review of Jiri Weil Life with a Star] TLS, December 8,1989
‘Worried, Norbury’, [Review of Penelope Fitzgerald The Coming of Spring] TLS September 23, 1988
[On Paul Celan] ‘A Sensibility Beyond’ [Essay] The Jewish Quarterly January 1988
[On Paul Celan] ‘Into your Narrowest Being: the poetry of Paul Celan’ [Essay] PN Review May 1988
[On T.S.Eliot] ’Through a Cocktail Glass Darkly’ Modern Drama December 1988
[On Ivan Klima] ‘Cabaret-time’ [Review of A Summer Affair] TLS, August 28, 1987
[On Rebecca West] ‘Reasons to be Late for Breakfast’ TLS, July 25, 1986
[On Rebecca West] ‘Rebecca West in Yugoslavia’ Contemporary Review May 1986
[On G.K. Chesterton] ‘Chesterton in Poland’, Chesterton Review XI 1985 3, 321-331
‘The Opening Chapter of Nakanune: Some thoughts on Possible German Origins,’Journal of European Studies viii 1978
History of Ideas
‘Clarifying the Enlightenment’, Insights 7, 2014 (University of Durham, Institute of Advanced Study)
‘The Sad Rider’ [On Jacques Derrida], Common Knowledge Fall 2014
‘1936, The Year Art Changed’ TLS, April 16, 2014
‘Sergei Uvarov, Father of Russian Conservatism’, Standpoint April 2014
”German Victorians who helped transform Britain’ Standpoint September 2013
‘Dreams of Displaced Men’, TLS, September 20, 2013
‘Heidegger and Darwin’, Philosophy Summer 2013
The Worpswede Painters From Realism to Blood and Soil Standpoint June 2012
Review of Victoria Frede The Russian Intelligentsia Wall Street Journal 2011
Essay on Edmund Wilson New Statesman September 2010
Review of Betram Patenaude Trotsky, Wall Street Journal
’Dialectics of Quietism’ [article] Common Knowledge Spring 2009
’Dear Little Soul’ [Martin Heidegger’s letters to his wife] TLS, May 15, 2009
’Heidegger’s Hut’, Standpoint, October 2009
[On Jonathan Israel Enlightenment Contested] ’When Freedom fought Faith’, The Independent, December 6, 2006
Arts
[On Wedekind, Haputmann and Schnitzler] ‘Seduced by Sorrow’ TLS, April 29, 2005
‘Arts Quality, Not Equality’ FT Magazine December 18, 2004
‘Back to the Future’ [Review of Capri futurista] TLS, February 28, 2003
[On Heinrich von Kleist The Prince of Homburg] TLS March 8, 2002
[On Roland Schimmelpfennig Arabian Night] TLS, May 10, 2002
[State of British Theatre] The World and I, October 2002
‘Play it again, Vaclav’ [On Havel’s Plays] The World and I, August 2001
‘A Universal Weakness’ [Review of Vaclav Havel Temptation] TLS, May 15, 1987
Russia
Interview with Rowan Williams, Arcbhishop of Canterbury, Prospect Magazine Online (www.prospect-magazine.co.uk) May 2007
’The Jews on Board the Philosophy Steamer – Lesley Chamberlain remembers the time when Russia expelled the Great and the Good’ The Jewish Quarterly Spring 2006
‘Witness to Bloody History’ [Nina Lugovskaya The Diary of a Soviet Schoolgirl]FT Magazine, November 6, 2004
‘Adventures in Otherland’ [On Russian Philosophy] FT Magazine July 17, 2004
‘At Home with Horror’ [Review of Simon Sebag Montefiore Stalin The Court of the Red Tsar The Independent 2003
‘Dark Side of the Moon’ [Review of Anne Applebaum Gulag] Los Angeles Times Book Review April 27,2003
[Review of Robert Service Russia Experiment with a People] The IndependentOctober 26, 2002
‘My Friend The Composer’ [Review of Story of a Friendship The Letters of Dmitri Shostakovich to Isaac Glikman] Literary Review January 2002
‘Defining Russia Musically’ [Review of Richard Taruskin Defining Russia Musically] Literary Review February 2001
‘The Prophet of Dissent’ [Review of Richard Lourie Sakharov] The Independentdate n/a
‘Dark Star’ [Review of Martin Malia Russia Under Western Eyes] Los Angeles Times Book Review May 16, 1999
‘The Call of the Wild’ [On Platonov] Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 24, 1999
[Review of D.M. Thomas Solzhenitsyn] Los Angeles Times Book ReviewFebruary 15, 1998
[Review of Dostoevsky and Soloviev] TLS, June 26, 1998
‘Idealist of the Silver Age’ [Review of Catherine Evtuhov The Cross and the Sickle Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy] TLS, October 24, 1997
‘Russia’s Fleurs du Mal’ [Contemporary Writing] Prospect February 1996
‘Freud and the Eros of the Impossible’ [Review of Aleksandr Etkind Eros nevozmozhnogo (The Story of Psychoanalysis in Russia)] TLS, August 25, 1995
‘Absurd Machines’ [Review of Pelevin Omon Ra] TLS, February 3, 1995
‘Naked Soul in Torment’ [Review of Maria Razumovsky Marina Tsvetaeva] The Times, February 1995
‘The Sunshine Beggar’ [Review of Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal Nietzsche and Soviet Culture] TLS, March 31, 1995
‘Russia and Her Sons’ [Review of ‘Abram Tertz Strolls with Pushkin, TurgenevFathers and Sons, etc] The Times 1994
‘Music Made out of the Terror Years’ [Review of Elizabeth Wilson Shostakovich],The Times, August 1994
‘Resurrection of a Peacetime War’ [Review of Annatoli Rybakov Fear] The Times, February 4, 1993
‘Party Poppers’ [Review of Richard Stites Russian Popular Culture] The Guardian August 22, 1992
Germany
[Review of Michael Gorra The Bells in Their Silence] ‘What is Germany?’ TLS, July 16, 2004
‘How a Nazi changed the course of Philosophy’ [Review of Richard WolinHeidegger’s Children] The Independent January 18, 2002
The Cold War
‘Schutzpass’ [review of Bengt Jangfeld The Hero of Budapest The Triumph and Tragedy of Raoul Wallenberg] TLS, August 13, 2014
‘Thought Crimes’ [Review of Barbara Day The Velvet Philosophers etc.] TLS December 10,1999
[review of John Keane Vaclav Havel] The Independent, October 6, 1999
’Young Romanian writers’ TLS 1989
’Under Eastern Eyes’, TLS, July 15, 1988. [on Soviet translations of British writers]
‘There’s a Spy in My Kitchen’ [on Marcus Wolff] Prospect April 1997
‘Reforming Russia’ [Review of Carol Rumens’ play Nearly Siberia] TLS, October 13, 1989
‘The Defense of Poetry’ [Review of Henry Gifford Poetry in a Divided World’ PN Review Vol 14, No 4 1987
‘The Sad Face of Romania’ The Salisbury Review, August 1986
‘Contemplating Russian Perversity — and our Own’, Detente September 1985
‘Sakharov in Moscow’, The Literary Review (Edinburgh), March 8-21, 1980
‘Nyet’(A country without Freud), Baltimore Sun, July 29, 1979
Second World War
‘Malice through the Looking-Glass; The Man who Shot Lord Haw-Haw’ [On Geoffrey Perry] FT Magazine February 28, 2004
‘Freud’s Revenge: How Sigmund’s Grandson made the Nazis Crawl’ FT Magazine June 28, 2003
‘Fighting the Nazis with a Transistor (sic)’ [On BBC wartime Monitoring Service],FT Magazine, May 3, 2003
Education
‘Come Back Aristotle’ Sunday Times 9 August 1998
‘A moral victory for Socrates’ The Times September 5, 1997
‘The teacher, the bully and a smack’ The Times, September 5, 1996
‘Some Notes on a Residential Literature Course for A level Students’ Modern Languages (Journal of the Modern Language Association) Vol. LVI No.9 December 1975
Religion
[Childhoods in Poetry and the Birth of Christ] The Independent December 27, 1989
[On St Augustine] ‘The Saint who was also Human’ The Independent April 25, 1987
Food
See above for contributions to BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme. Here are a few published articles:
‘The Black Diamond’ [On the Black Truffle] Prospect March 1996
[On a Russian Food Museum] ‘From Moscow with Love’ The Guardian Weekend, March 12, 1994
‘Licking the Plato’ [Review of Colin Spencer The Faber Book of Food] The Times, 1993
’Recipes for Disaster’ TLS, December 23, 1988. [on Marinetti’s La Cucina futurista]
See also many articles 1996-2001 (issues 1-20) in Slow The Journal of the Slow Food Movement and occasional articles in Petits propos culinaires.
‘Tournedos Rossini’ is reprinted in The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy ed. Davidson Berkeley/Toronto 2002
‘Fish and Chips’ and ‘A Latter-Day Religion – Vegetarianism’ are reprinted inSlow Food ed. Carlo Petrini White River Junction, VT 2001
Translations
’After the Ball’, (L.Tolstoy), in The Penguin Book of Russian Short Stories Harmondsworth 1981
Interviews with Lesley Chamberlain
Interview with Lesley Chamberlain in The Daily Telegraph Magazine, February 25, 2006
Interview with Lesley Chamberlain on Russian Philosophy in Philosophy Now No 54 Feb-March 2006 (www.philosophynow.org)
’The Exile of the Beautiful Minds’ Interview with Lesley Chamberlain in The Scotsman, Saturday 19 August, 2006
