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“... than the Canadians of the 1970s. Rebecca, the only survivor of a family of Jewish sisters, went to Israel. Prema, once an anti-Nazi saboteur, went to Australia but returned to Czechoslovakia in 1968 (just missing Smiricky on his way out) and wrote to him from their hometown, giving the news (mostly bad) about their old friends, and ...”

“... of 1799, Admiral Sidney Smith’s naval squadron bombarded the coast at Acre, in what is now Israel, and effectively put an end to Napoleon’s dream of marching on to India in the wake of Alexander the Great. Two centuries later, another demonstration of ‘shock and awe’ lit up the night skies over Baghdad and started the latest and most ill-fated ...”

“... under ‘Religion’. As misrepresentations go, it’s not bad: a deity created in our own image. Jonathan Glover’s book is not exclusively about the Holocaust, but unlike many other atrocities chronicled in this lengthy codex it bags a section to itself, and the culminating one: the Final Solution as grand finale. The book’s subtitle is ‘a moral ...”

“... better-known than this. Or is he? The Water Music and the Music for the Royal Fireworks; Messiah; Israel in Egypt – is this the total tally? Surely Bach is the one whose music is well-known. But again the list is surprisingly limited. The Mass in B Minor; the two Passions; the Brandenburg Concertos and the D minor Concerto for two violins – after this it ...”

“... Europe’s most open and prosperous societies. This fascinating world has been brought to life by Jonathan Israel’s great study, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (2001). But Israel isn’t mentioned in Multitude’s extensive notes. Hardt and Negri’s concern is with rebirth, not ...”

“... himself to do that. He still can’t bring himself to do it when faced with another crisis, the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006. Again, he acknowledges that Hizbullah firing rockets on Israel was ‘a quite deliberate provocation’ and that ‘Israel reacted to the provocation in the way ...”

“... with death. No scene is too humdrum to be energised by the ubiquity of death. In Ghost MacIndoe, Jonathan Buckley introduces the war in the fifth line with the sentence: ‘The postman tipped his helmet to Alexander’s mother.’ The postman wears a helmet? Something is out there trying to kill postmen? That’s war, that is. The British Army still ...”

“... Jonathan Franzen has in the past been a writer who has flourished in sequences and streaks, in set-pieces and sections, the kinds of book of which you could ask: ‘What are your favourite tracks?’ The Corrections’ war of attrition between Caroline and Gary Lambert is a breathtakingly good sequence – but Gary remains the most underpowered character in the novel ...”

“... schemes to hijack a delivery of uranium. With the uranium Egypt will atom-bomb a defenceless Israel. Only one man can track down Hassan – Nat Dickstein, unprepossessing, middle-aged Mossad agent, son of an East End cobbler. He is helped by a beautiful girl who finds herself in the final scenes alone at sea with the villain. She risks her life and her ...”

“... and sends up its clichés. (It’s hard not to see the comment about ‘zany guides’ as a dig at Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated.) Within the first few chapters, Kaiser’s ‘tiny but nonetheless significant act of Holocaust justice’ starts to look more ambiguous. When he tells friends what he’s doing, he’s surprised at their ...”

“... a name-check in the Bible. The first Book of Samuel tells the story of Saul, the anointed King of Israel who had failed to show sufficient ferocity in the persecution of God’s enemies. After several years of undistinguished kingship he found himself facing military humiliation at the hands of the Philistines, and applied to God for explanations and ...”

“... being charitable, Dickens. And I don’t believe Krauss when she tells me about Alma’s trip to Israel for her Bat Mitzvah, where her grandparents, Bubbe and Zeyde, look after her. At the Dead Sea, Bubbe appraises Alma: ‘You don’t have a bosom? Vat happened?’ At the Wailing Wall, grandmother and granddaughter place their prayers in the cracks of the ...”

“... solidarity, China granted $4.7 million in hard currency to Egypt just as Britain, France and Israel were attacking it over the Suez Canal. China extended credit to a number of recently independent African states – Ghana, Mali, Tanzania, Kenya, Guinea – and gave millions to Nepal, Ceylon (soon to become Sri Lanka), Indonesia and Cambodia. It also ...”

“... boarding schools, bricklaying, postpunk fanzine production and hand-to-mouth endeavours in Israel and Germany – to publish, in her early fifties, a pair of novels that made her the talk of Brooklyn. The first of them, The Wallcreeper (2014), was written in three weeks in order to make a point to ...”

“... of Kuwait, Amnesty put out an eighty-page document. Twenty-three years have gone by since Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Amnesty has yet to produce as comprehensive a single report on Israeli abuses against Palestinians. Why the urgency only in the case of Kuwait? Although the use of torture in the occupied territories has been ...”