When he describes Alexander the Great slicing through the Gordian knot, Gombrich regrets that his mother never let him do anything like that. But the narrative skips along, lightened by jokes and whimsies. Gombrich groans about religious warfare and says he has written as little about it as he can near the end, he apologises for having to mention Adolf Hitler. I never trust academics who are, how can you think if you're always looking in the mirror?'Ī Little History is weighty, often gloomy, though it tactfully dilutes the bad tidings to protect its young readers. He was many things, but he wasn't glamorous. She once said, "I can't leave my husband for a cat", even though the pussy had all the glamour that my grandfather lacked. For a while, they hired cat sitters, but he suspected that my grandmother would have preferred to stay behind with Purratz rather than accompany him to his international conferences. They had to give it away when my grandfather retired and began to travel.
There are pictures of it with its huge, black mane draped on their grand piano. 'My grandparents did have a famous cat, called Purratz, which, I suppose, is an onomatopoeic miaow in German. I asked her about an aside in his chapter on Akhenaton, when Gombrich says he believes the ancient Egyptians were right to consider cats as sacred animals. 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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