He spent his life creating a vast illustrated memoir.
He is preparing for a chamber opera called Giacomo Variations, which will put Mozart's music to Casanova's vast 4,000-page 4,000-pagetell the story of his final years, and it will see memoirich in period costome as tellageing Lotherio.
In this respect the book rises impressively, even magnificently, to its own occasions, building out of its fact-crammed but stately sentences (the impersonal prose resembles that of a mandarin memoir) vast and phosphorescent tableaux vivants seething with Dantesque detail.
All three of these ports were famously cosmopolitan, with 10 languages being spoken on every street corner, and all three were remembered in vast amounts of memoirs and official documentation, which Mansel handles with his usual elegance and skill.
But despite well-known exceptions like Primo Levi's "Survival in Auschwitz," Alexander Donat's "Holocaust Kingdom" and Anne Frank's "Diary," the vast majority of Holocaust memoirs remain unpublished and in the hands of survivors and their descendants.
A unique comedy stand-up/cabaret/one-act theatrical hybrid, the show features a talented rotating cast (many of them well-known stars or media personalities in their own right) reading verbatim, usually with a wink and a nudge, from a vast array of celebrity memoirs.
From a hard and vast archival mass of journals, memoirs, newspaper clippings and art-history books, Mr de Waal has fashioned, stroke by minuscule stroke, a book as fresh with detail as if it had been written from life, and as full of beauty and whimsy as a netsuke from the hands of a master carver.
A vast and solitary undertaking, at once memoir and chronicle, "Histoire(s) du Cinema" is akin to the high-modernist, private mythologies of "Finnegans Wake" or Walter Benjamin's unfinished "Arcades Project".
But the title of this often touching memoir refers equally to the vast changes, moral and technological, that have obliterated the way of life the author remembers here.
These are reinforced or augmented by Powell drawing on Zachary Leader's vast Life of Kingsley Amis, Elizabeth Jane Howard's Slipstream: A Memoir and a lot of dutifully referenced other stuff.
