Karl Sabbagh

Emma Barnes writes that Keynes would have found unrealistic ‘the idea that governments might impose hairshirt policies on citizens (especially when there was no guarantee that other governments would do the same) or that individuals themselves would choose to reduce their consumption dramatically (again, with no guarantee that others would do the same)’ (Letters, 22 November). It’s worth noting...

One of the cadavers from which samples of Spanish flu virus have been taken was that of Sir Mark Sykes, who along with Georges-Picot reorganised the Middle East after the First World War. Sykes was exhumed in 2008, and his lungs and brain supplied 17 samples of the virus for research.

Stephen Sedley writes that it is difficult to track events that failed to take place because of pressure to abandon events critical of Israel, ‘or for fear of it’ (LRB, 4 May). Well here is just one example. Last autumn Skyscraper, of which I am managing director, published a book called State of Terror, about the regular and systematic use of terror attacks by Jewish gangs against British, Arab...

Tom Crewe writes that A.C. Benson’s diary was the ‘longest known to be in existence’ (LRB, 20 April). In fact, at four million words, it was merely on the nursery slopes. The American poet Arthur Crew Inman’s diaries ran to 17 million words and generated a play and an opera. Inman died in 1963. A severely abridged version in two volumes, edited by Daniel Aaron, was published by Harvard in the...

Henry Siegman says that he isn’t aware of a single major American TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questioned the Israeli line. He must have missed the extraordinary exchange broadcast live on CNN, after the station decided to fact-check the allegation made by the Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti that Israel, not Hamas, had broken the truce.The exchange began with the presenter...