SKU: 52444740753

Parallel Lives A Love Story from a Lost Continent by Iain Pears (Hardcover)

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Parallel Lives A Love Story from a Lost Continent by Iain Pears (Hardcover)This is the simplest tale in the world. Two people meet and fall in love. But the route which brought Larissa Salmina and Francis Haskell to a backstreet Venetian restaurant in 1962 was anything but straightforward. Larissa was born in northern Russia, the daughter of a Soviet army officer from a noble family who survived the siege of Leningrad by eating cats tails and being evacuated over the ice. Francis was the grandson of an Iraqi Jew, forever

This is the simplest tale in the world. Two people meet and fall in love. But the route which brought Larissa Salmina and Francis Haskell to a backstreet Venetian restaurant in 1962 was anything but straightforward.

Larissa was born in northern Russia, the daughter of a Soviet army officer from a noble family who survived the siege of Leningrad by eating cats’ tails and being evacuated over the ice. Francis was the grandson of an Iraqi Jew, forever feeling out of place in his adopted country of England. How they could meet and instantly understand each other so profoundly that both were prepared to risk heartbreak, and in her case, retribution, to be together is the story of this book.

Escaping Leningrad, teenage Larissa lived in the Urals surrounded by Spanish revolutionaries, went feral and after the war rose to become the youngest Commissar in the Soviet Union and Keeper of Italian Drawings at the Hermitage. She took the Russian contribution to the Venice Biennale in 1962 and lost it on the journey. She briefly absconded with her supervisor’s corpse, developed a useful sideline in forgery, and stole (“I didn’t steal it. I liberated it”) a Matisse from the Italian government. She was a trained connoisseur and could spot a Tiepolo at 100 yards.

Francis was a distinguished art historian, comfortably at home in King’s College Cambridge. But he was lonely, self-doubting and had all but abandoned hope of falling in love, or finding anyone who could love him. Larissa swept away all the years of anguish in one meal. Bestselling novelist and art historian Iain Pears’ fabulous book brings into sharp focus the strange world of the Soviet Union, and the even stranger world of a certain variety of the English elite. It seeks to show how leaving the Soviet Union was a sacrifice for her and how it was the English man, not the Russian woman, who was set free because of their meeting.

Iain Pears knew both his principal characters well. His book is a story of Europe; not the Europe of geographical and ideological divisions but of a certain mentality which was common to a few on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Whatever their differences in nationality, language, and politics, both Larissa and Francis were members of a unified, pan-European culture which paid little heed to the divisions which so pre-occupied most people of the age. It also operated by very different rules and values to the societies in which they existed. It was a world of dancers, exiles, and the occasional spy, of artists, aristocrats, and academics. It consisted of people who only felt safe when they were away from home, were comfortable only in the company of foreigners. It is a tale of a world we seem to have lost.

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SKU: 52444740753

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Nurseynurse
Whiting, US
★★★★★ 5
Amazing resource
Format: Perfect Paperback
The second edition is packed with awesome info and nextgen style questions. Highly recommend to all nursing students as a complimentary resource for health assessment and to prep for the nclex
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Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2024
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John Moore
Port Orchard, US
★★★★★ 5
Guided tour through a difficult work
Format: Paperback
For the non-expert reader of Plato, this is a very good text for working through Timaeus. Actually, it may be useful to expert readers as well, but I wouldn't know about that, being firmly situated in the non-expert camp. Though some scholars may take exception to certain parts of Cornford's translation and interpretation, for those of us trying to get through it for the first time and on our own, this is still an exceptional guide. By the way, for an alternative translation and interpretation, the reader may want to check out Kalkavage's translation (Focus Philosophical Library), it is very good (I would rate it 5 stars also) and has some extremely helpful appendices for understanding references to music, astronomy, and geometry.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2013
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Reviewer from San Ramon
Bozeman, US
★★★★★ 5
Cornford's Plato Cosmology/Timaeus
Format: Paperback
This is an excellent and invaluable reference book for Plato's Timaeus. If you are reading Timaeus you MUST have this book. It contains line-by-line commentary, and also, most valuable, some very helpful illustrations (example: illustration of the human body as Timaeus explained it). I would, however, balance this book with other books that attempt to place Timaeus within the rest of Plato's works. I recommend, for example, Peter Kalkavage's Timaeus. There, he attempts to link Timaeus and Republic.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2011
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Wilbur F. Pierce
Massapequa, US
★★★★★ 5
An Excellent Choice
Format: Paperback
Excellent introduction, notes and translation.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2017
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David Lemberg
Grantham, US
★★★★★ 5
Five Stars
Format: Paperback
Professor Cornford's translation with running commentary is definitive.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2015

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