Shorter notices
Victorian Studies in Scarlet Richard D. Altick (Dent £3.25) Man's curiosity about murder was never stronger than in the Victorian age, "our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak," George Orwell said. Professor Altick examines the commercialism around what he describes as a " spectator sport" — from broadsides to popular newspapers, from the Gothic novel to Dickens, on the stage and in Madame Tussaud's. The Duke of Wellington took care to be notified whenever a new figure was added, and specified, "not forgetting the Chamber of Horrors." The author detects a number of literary personalities who were near the scene of the crime in real life, and then goes on to spot-light the participants in some of our more spectacular trials. Whether they served to encourage popular literacy or moral degeneracy, they provided above all a popular entertainment. A thought-provoking book for both social historian and ghoul. S.F. • .Life with the Painters of La Roche Marevna (Constable £3.50) Marevna (Maria Vorobiev) arrived in Paris as an art student in the years immediately before the First World War and was accepted into the circle of artists and poets who patronised the cafe Rotonde. She concentrates on describing the three painters she knew best: Modigliani, Soutine and her stormy relationship with Diego Rivera throughout the privations of the war. In one of the many captivating line drawings by the author, they all walk arm in arm down the rue de la Gatte:Rivera brandishing his Mexican walking stick, Modigliani and Soutine smoking caporal cigarettes, the " horse-faced Ehrenburg and the leonine Voloshin," Picasso and Max Jacob clad in enormous checked cubist' overcoats and outsize jockey caps. Marevna, now aged eighty, lives in Ealing; her work is exhibited in the Guggenheim Museum and the Modern Art Foundation, GeT neva. S.F.
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