Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, “a bulky rock thrown into the pool of post-war forgiving and forgetfulness”, was also, according to Frederic Raphael, a riposte to Jean-Paul Sartre’s preconceptions about Jewishness. In Lanzmann’s memoirs Sartre emerges as a dominant influence, albeit given to drunken ravings. Though a lover of Simone de Beauvoir and one of the Temps Modernes “family”, Lanzmann nevertheless remained “valiant for truth and undiplomatic in its proclamation”, alert to anti-Semitism and cruelty, whether of the Right or Left. What’s more, he was – along with Sartre – reduced to tears by Brief Encounter.

As many have been by Gone with the Wind, discussed by Paula Marantz Cohen; and as some – to this writer’s knowledge – can be by a slightly less celebrated English wartime classic, A Canterbury Tale. This last should be remembered along with the other films, TV and theatre adaptations, rap performances and retellings inspired by Chaucer’s original Tales and welcomed by Carolyne Larrington in her review of two new versions, one of them by the pre-eminent contemporary chronicler of London, Peter Ackroyd. “Chaucer the Londoner is perhaps currently the most significant Chaucer in circulation, superseding Chaucer the ironist and, to some extent, Chaucer the smut-merchant.” Earlier generations of English schoolboys might have looked rather to their Greek and Latin poets for smut, though this was presumably not the reason for the popularity of Euripides “in the Byzantine schoolroom”. Emily Wilson takes us painlessly through his Phaethon, its fragments newly readable in Loeb and as reconstructed by Alistair Elliot. Some of those same young Etonians could have administered the floggings that so inflamed Algernon Charles Swinburne, who died 100 years ago this April. His addiction to the English vice and other predilections ensured him a scandalous notoriety in Victorian England. But, Jonathan Bate argues, he was not only a master-metrician and a sexual pioneer; as a critic he was ahead of his time, too.

Alan Jenkins

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