good soldier

His “answer to virtually every diplomatic challenge was ‘war’,” writes the historian Christopher Clark in Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 ... In spite of his war-like policy, Conrad lived for much of his life with his mother. According to Clark, he took great pains that his appearance was “manly, dapper and youthful”, and cut-out advertisements for anti-wrinkle cream from the newspapers. He was shy, prone to depression and preferred the solitude of the mountains, where he drew romantic sketches. Two years after his wife died in 1905, he formed a sentimental attachment to the wife of a Viennese industrialist, Gina von Reininghaus. Although she rejected him initially, Gina agreed – after another Staff member had impressed upon her the harm her rejection could do to the Empire – to allow Conrad to hope that they might one day become an item. He wrote her many love letters – sometimes several a day – which he retained without sending, instead collecting them in his “Diary of my Sufferings”. - Am I no better than a eunuch?

Conrad is an emblamatic figure for the historian Clark, who questions whether one of the contributory causes of the First World War was a “crisis of masculinity“.

курсив мой, ага.