Poor Leonie, the light shines on the remembered face of an adored ancestor and brings back the quirks of character and fond, private partialities suppressed in his academic writing. The process, he says, is like lighting a scrap of paper and dropping it into a black, abysmal well the flare illuminates the past. That is why 'we ask old people to tell us what they remember'. Gombrich begins the book by acknowledging that history is first of all a story, the transmission of experience between generations. So he agreed to an English edition, though he didn't live long enough to add the chapter on Shakespeare that he had in mind.' I remember him being surprised that his cleaning lady was going on holiday to exotic destinations. John Major was less hostile to Europe than Margaret Thatcher, and the budget airlines opened up a wider world. 'Before his death, he thought that the English were perhaps warming up to this lump of land just across the channel. The English, after all, were inward-looking islanders why would they be interested in the history of a world to which they did not consider they belonged? Leonie Gombrich, his granddaughter and literary executor, described his change of heart when we met last week in New York. Translations were later made for markets as outlandish as Turkey, but Gombrich hesitated over allowing A Little History to be published in his adopted country. Though the book was an immediate success, the Nazis banned it, enraged by its pacifism.
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