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Tracts for the Times

Karl Miller, 17 August 1989

Intellectuals 
by Paul Johnson.
Weidenfeld, 385 pp., £14.95, October 1988, 0 297 79395 0
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CounterBlasts No 1: God, Man and Mrs Thatcher 
by Jonathan Raban.
Chatto, 72 pp., £2.99, June 1989, 0 7011 3470 4
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... some intellectuals have been thought to have difficulty in changing their socks. Bertrand Russell, Paul Johnson reports, was unable to make himself a cup of tea. The term came to currency with the classifications employed in the Marxist system, and has been used to deplore the scarcity in this country of a certain someone supposedly thick on the European ...

In Icy Baltic Waters

David Blackbourn: Gunter Grass, 27 June 2002

Im Krebsgang: Eine Novelle 
by Günter Grass.
Steidl, 216 pp., €18, February 2002, 3 88243 800 2
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... to 12 years’ imprisonment, he was released after the Allied victory in 1945 and emigrated to Israel. Gustloff’s body was carried back to Schwerin, where he was buried with full honours. In 1937, the year after his death, the Wilhelm Gustloff was christened by his widow with the customary bottle of champagne and went into service as a pleasure cruiser ...

Through the Grinder

Graham Coster, 8 February 1996

The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean 
by Paul Theroux.
Hamish Hamilton, 523 pp., £17.50, November 1995, 0 241 13504 4
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... Are you making a trip here to write a book?’ inquires the manager as Paul Theroux books into a hotel in Corsica, 136 pages into his latest travel narrative. ‘I don’t know,’ replies the author. ‘It was the truth,’ he adds as an aside. ‘It was too early in my Mediterranean journey for me to tell whether it might be a book ...

He’ll have ye smilin’

Charles Glass: Kissinger’s Duplicity, 20 October 2022

Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy 
by Martin Indyk.
Knopf, 677 pp., £28, October 2021, 978 1 101 94754 8
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... WASPs. His Dr Strangelove accent remained a lifelong reminder of his émigré status. (Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister at the time, told him that her foreign minister spoke better English than he did.) Yet after becoming a naturalised American at the age of twenty he liked to describe himself in terms of his adopted country’s folklore. He told a ...

At Auckland Castle

Nicola Jennings: Francisco de Zurbarán, 4 June 2020

... Turks, Castilian gentlemen from the past, the 12 Peers of France and the Tribes of Israel’. Zurbarán is also known to have given a set of Jacob and His 12 Sons to the local convent of San Jerónimo de Buenavista in 1659 in order to settle a debt. ‘Joseph’ Central to Zurbarán’s method was his use of models and motifs from prints by ...

Wilsonia

Paul Foot, 2 March 1989

The Wilson Plot: The Intelligence Services and the Discrediting of a Prime Minister 
by David Leigh.
Heinemann, 271 pp., £12.95, November 1988, 0 434 41340 2
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A Price too High 
by Peter Rawlinson.
Weidenfeld, 284 pp., £16, March 1989, 0 297 79431 0
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... were almost exclusively rewarded for these ‘services’ with high honours. His connections with Israel and with businessmen who shared apparently contradictory interests in Eastern European countries and in Israel, were far too close and cosy for a properly democratic political leader. The land deals at Wigan, from which ...

Diary

Edward Said: Reflections on the Hebron Massacre, 7 April 1994

... is that Zionism and Judaism are one and the same; both speak of Palestine as the land of Israel; and both regard Arabs on ‘the land of Israel’ as aliens and barely tolerable intruders. Above all, Zionism sees itself as redeeming the land whose natives have called it ‘Palestine’ for a millennium and a ...

The Push for War

Anatol Lieven: The Threat from America, 3 October 2002

... stated goals. There are of course different groups within this camp: some are more favourable to Israel, others less hostile to China; not all would support the most radical aspects of the programme. However, the basic and generally agreed plan is unilateral world domination through absolute military superiority, and this has been consistently advocated and ...

Catching

Michael Hofmann, 23 May 1996

Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew 
by John Felstiner.
Yale, 344 pp., £19.95, June 1995, 0 300 06068 8
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Breathturn 
by Paul Celan, translated by Pierre Joris.
Sun & Moon, 261 pp., $21.95, September 1995, 1 55713 218 6
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... Paul Celan was born in 1920 as Paul Antschel, to German-speaking Jewish parents in Czernowitz, the capital of the Bukovina: ‘a posthumously born Kakanier,’ he once said of himself (the city and province of his birth had been ceded to Romania in 1918, when the Habsburg Empire was broken up ...

Are we in a war? Do we have an enemy?

Slavoj Žižek: Love Thy Neighbour, 23 May 2002

... in the way the Western media report from the occupied West Bank: when the Israeli Army, in what Israel itself describes as a ‘war’ operation, attacks the Palestinian police and sets about systematically destroying the Palestinian infrastructure, Palestinian resistance is cited as proof that we are dealing with terrorists. This paradox is inscribed into ...

Manliness

D.A.N. Jones, 20 December 1984

Last Ferry to Manly 
by Jill Neville.
Penguin, 165 pp., £4.95, October 1984, 0 14 007068 0
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Down from the Hill 
by Alan Sillitoe.
Granada, 218 pp., £7.95, October 1984, 0 246 12517 9
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God Knows 
by Joseph Heller.
Cape, 353 pp., £8.95, November 1984, 0 224 02288 1
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Wilt on High 
by Tom Sharpe.
Secker, 236 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 9780436458118
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... Labour victory, but the story is as fresh as if the boy had written it yesterday. The cyclist, Paul Morton, is expecting to leave his factory and become an air-traffic control assistant, but he is worried about a medical report which may prove him to be tubercular. The dust-cover biography of Alan Sillitoe suggests that the story may be partly ...

Vengeful Pathologies

Adam Shatz, 2 November 2023

... of course the thing that happened last Saturday as well was this very deadly attack by Hamas on Israel. How do you understand that attack? What did you think of that?’‘You cannot just put people into prison, deprive them of their fundamental rights, and then see nothing in response,’ Hasaneen replied. ‘You cannot dehumanise people and expect nothing ...

One day I’ll tell you what I think

Adam Shatz: Sartre in Cairo, 22 November 2018

No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Decolonisation 
by Yoav Di-Capua.
Chicago, 355 pp., £26, March 2018, 978 0 226 50350 9
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The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student-Movement Generation in Egypt 
by Arwa Salih, translated by Samah Selim.
Seagull, 163 pp., £20, April 2018, 978 0 85742 483 9
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... In the spring​ of 1961, Frantz Fanon wrote to his publisher in Paris to suggest that he ask Jean-Paul Sartre for a preface to his anti-colonial manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth. ‘Tell him that every time I sit down at my desk, I think of him.’ For revolutionary intellectuals in the Third World, Sartre seemed miraculously uncontaminated by the paternalism – and hypocrisy – that gave the white left such a bad reputation ...

Operation Overstretch

David Ramsbotham: Unfair to the Army, 20 February 2003

... there are deeper considerations of the kind that Field Marshal Carver raised in Borneo. When Israel knocked out Iraq’s nuclear installations in 1981, acting in pre-emptive self-defence after receiving clear intelligence warnings, it was roundly condemned by Mrs Thatcher: ‘Armed attack in such circumstances cannot be justified. It represents a grave ...

When it is advisable to put on a fez

Richard Popkin: Adventures of a Messiah, 23 May 2002

The Lost Messiah: In Search of Sabbatai Sevi 
by John Freely.
Viking, 275 pp., £20, September 2001, 0 670 88675 0
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... messianic claims derived in part from the work of the popular Jewish thinker Menasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam. In 1650, Menasseh published The Hope of Israel, outlining the various developments which showed that the world was drawing closer and closer to the messianic age. Menasseh, a rabbi at the Amsterdam ...

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