David Cesarani
A Chronicle of Suffering and Spirituality
The Pity of It All: A Portrait of German Jews 1743-1933
By Amos Elon
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 446pp £25 order from our bookshop
The Jews of Germany have always fascinated historians, Jewish and non-Jewish. For those with a Zionist inclination the trajectory of German Jews proved the folly of assimilation and the illusion of integration. For German and German-born Jewish scholars who emerged from the wreckage of exile the question that begged for an answer was, How did this happen? Their tortured, often self-tormenting enquiries have caught the imagination of successive generations obsessed by questions of identity and belonging, especially since the 1960s.
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'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2