This is the sort of idea that gets under your skin, and as West returns to it (several times) in this book, she adds nuance and depth to it. They are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world asīy moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy Idiocy is theįemale defect: intent on their private lives, women follow theirįate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in Her question made me remember that the word “idiot”Ĭomes from a Greek root meaning private person. Has been assassinated.” “Oh, dear!” she replied. “Switch on the telephone ! I must speak to my husband at once.Ī most terrible thing has happened. I rang for my nurse, and when she came I cried to her, Had been assassinated in the streets of Marseilles that morning’. At the book's beginning she recalls being in hospital in 1934, and hearing on the radio ‘how the King of Yugoslavia It's not a book to bolt: full of fascinating detail, often very funny in a mordant kind of way, and advancing several key Westian ideas: for instance that women are idiots and men lunatics. I'm reading it at the moment, in between other things. Magnus it certainly is: it's more than 1100 pages long, rich and detailed throughout more a meditation on how history shapes the present, and how both factor in specific identities, societies and cultures. There's a consensus among critics and readers that Rebecca West's enormous travelogue, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941) is her magnum opus.

Black lamb and gray falcon