In keeping with the ‘blithe schizophrenia’ with which he managed his four pseudonyms, Tucholsky’s personal circumstances have been muted, dissembled and changed in a brave and resourceful way. Nothing could be further removed from the spirit of this book than self-pity, resignation and gloom. It has serious depths, but they have been concealed where it is most difficult and distinguished to conceal them: on the surface. The subjects of Tucholsky’s publicistic writings – love and friendship, creativity and language, freedom and authority, nationalities, justice and modern life – appear everywhere: in conversations and casual reflections. Only in the astonishing, black reverie on gladiators and ancient Rome with its meditation and how a society keeps its members quiet by offering them violent spectacles, is there anything like a formal digression.

As well as finding the tone of Castle Gripsholm extraordinarily free and fresh, the reader may see a surprising modernity in the externals of a book written over fifty years ago. This comes in part from the abundance in it of those institutions that have more and more given texture to modern life: the office and the holiday, the customs and frontiers, the shop-window, the museum, the landlady and the boss. (The book is dedicated to a car licence-plate number.) In Stockholm, Tucholsky comments on the oppressiveness of modern cities, ‘the occidental uniform, with American trimmings’. This awareness has something to do, I think, with Tucholsky’s loneliness: a man with a home and loved ones would perhaps be more protected from the dominance of such neutral institutions, less painfully aware of their awful pervasiveness.

Tucholsky’s loneliness can be indirectly – and surprisingly – laid at the door of Frau Adriani, one of his ‘Anstaltsweiber’, from a long string of authoritarian female figures in his work. The first of these occurred in 1914, in an article on the actress Rosa Bertens, playing a role from Strindberg:

‘She sat in an upholstered chair, gripping both the arm-rests. Was she still in command? She had been in command for fifteen, twenty years, maybe longer, and they had been bitter years . . . This was her kingdom, and the view of the distant horizon was obstructed. She ruled here, ruled by all available means . . . There was the family table with the cosy lamp. A flight in the sunshine? You try flying when the lead weights of women drag you to the ground. Down! Down! Down! . . .’