Vivian Rakoff

During World War Two and the closing of the Suez Canal, Cape Town reverted to its maritime role as “the tavern of the seas,” the last point of Europe—albeit colonial Europe—before sailors entered the East, both mythical and actual. Troopships, battleships and supply vessels filled the great bay of the harbour, and soldiers being ferried from the European theatre of war to the East or Australians and New Zealanders heading for Europe poured off the transports and made free throughout the…

There was a time in the late 1960s and ’70s when madness, or more accurately the appearance of benign craziness, became chic. On campuses throughout the western world, eccentricity, drug taking, protests, free speech movements and the occupation of university offices became a norm. The rhetoric was powerful: the power of the prosaic, rational, mercantile fathers was to be over-thrown and a new freedom was about to be…

The cover promises a dark story: The Beckmann painting is quintessentially German Expressionist, a somber cityscape, a dark river with ice floes, a crescent moon, heavily outlined buildings. Iconically Weimar. It is both the armature and the background to this European memoir. But the memoir itself, is for the most part, a series of lightly told bits of a life…