Perchance to dream

This book reads like an interesting after- dinner conversation between intelligent friends. That said, it is a rambling conversation, and although it is extremely entertaining, it does not add up to much.

Its ostensible subjects are two instances of scientific intelligence being brought to bear on the possibility of defying, or surviving, death. In the first case, John Gray investigates those, such as Freddie Myers and Henry Sidgwick, who formed the Society for Psychical Research. In the second instance, Gray tells again the bizarre story of the cult of Lenin, and Leonid Krasin’s belief that, if Lenin’s body could be kept in a state of cryonic suspension, there might dawn a glad day in which Comrade Lenin could return to life.

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In both cases, Gray writes, as always, with great brio and wit. And along the way, he rambles round many interesting historical byways, investigating the emotional lives of figures as various as Arthur Balfour, H.G.Wells and the diplomat- journalist-spy Robert Bruce Lockhart. (Lockhart, Wells and others were madly in love with Nick Clegg’s voluptuous great-great-aunt Moura, who was ‘planted’ on both men by the Cheka) .

Gray seems so obsessed by the emotional lives of the characters he observes that the supposed central theme — human beings attempting to come to terms with mortality — gets blurred in a welter of tittle-tattle. In the case of the harmless intellectuals who formed the Society for Psychical Research, I found this approach something of a distraction. Poor old Henry Sidgwick, for example, is held up to us as a ‘hypocrite’ for failing to face up to his supposed homosexuality. But does there exist a scintilla of evidence that Sidgwick was in fact homosexually inclined, still less a practising gay? Arthur Balfour received innumerable letters, supposedly spirit-written by a young woman called Annie Marshall, to whom he had been somewhat loosely engaged, and who committed suicide.