Frederic Raphael
Escape to Liberty
Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance
By Michael Goldfarb
Scribe 448pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
In the bestiaries of boobies, brutes, bishops and quite a few bien pensants, the Jews are literally bloody: as age succeeds to age, they are said to have killed Jesus, to make Passover matzos by tapping the blood of kidnapped Gentiles (usually infants) and to be prone to haemorrhoids (and tails). Move into the metaphorical register and they double – duplicity being their prime protean attribute – as capitalist bloodsuckers, revolutionary terrorists, Holocaust-fabricators and Zionist SS men.
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I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.