Mostly History and Lit .....

During his years as a LIFE correspondent based in Paris in the 1950s, Timothy Foote had time to fall half in love with France. But mostly he was out of town, a witness to a good deal of history in the making. France's Algerian War, Nasser's seizure of the Suez Canal, Nikita Khrushchev's first visit outside the USSR (to Yugoslavia in 1955, where he forgave Tito for leaving the Soviet East European bloc, remarking with exquisite irony: “My father's socialist house has many mansions.”).

Most notably, he observed the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Russia, during which he was shot (but only in the hand.) and eventually came back to New York to edit a book put out by LIFE entitled Hungary's Fight for Freedom.

Thereafter, during a half century variously spent as a Senior editor of LIFE, and then of TIME and finally at the Smithsonian, he got out of town as much as possible, managing to write hundreds of literary reviews and scores of articles on a mix of subjects.  Among them: dog trials, feminism, Harvard, Peter Breugel, W.H. Auden, James Madison, the America's Cup Race, Sex & Tennis, Hadrian's Wall, Midway Island, the Rock of Gibraltar.

Here is a selection of his work.  With Book Review sections in newspapers and magazines now being subtracted from the world left and right, the 150 literary reviews may one day prove to be examples of useful historic preservation.  Like the other titles, they are offered as a modest bridgehead into the kingdom of the past.

tgf(at)bluecliff(dot)com