There will, I’m afraid, be no prizes for guessing which aspect if his life I’m going to focus on. The Great Terror didn’t make him popular with the useful idiots in the West who defended Soviet Russia (you can still find them around today, not least on this website) but he had an answer to that:
(When the Soviet archives were opened, his publisher wanted a new edition, and The Great Terror: A Reassessment duly came out in 1990. His friend Kingsley Amis suggested it be called I Told You So, You Fucking Fools)
There’s more about his limericks (and more examples) in this fond remembrance by Blake Morrison
...and in this blog
It’s little wonder he once said “Limericks are not very gentlemanly – or it’s a special kind of gentleman”
But perhaps his finest moment was summarising all of Shakespeare’s famous ‘seven ages of man’ speech...
...which is just one of the reasons why Philip Larkin called him “il miglior fabbro [the better craftsman] ... at least over five lines.”
(Join me tomorrow for the early 20th century discovery of some 15,000-year-old cave art that features some of the earliest scrawled cock and balls pictures in human history)
I’m obsessed with RUssian history so I know Conquest but didn’t know the limerick aspect of him. Very humanizing.
Yes, he sounds like he’d have been fun to know
To rhyme "have done in" and "did one in" is just amazing.
