Nigel Jones
Sparks of Humanity
No country or people suffered more profoundly during the Second World War than the nation where it all started: Poland. Hitler’s invasion on 1 September 1939 was swiftly followed by Stalin’s occupation of eastern Poland – pre-arranged the previous month in the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Under the tender mercies of Nazi rule, over six million Poles – including, of course, the vast majority of its Jews – were shot, gassed or worked to death in extermination camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzek and Chelmno. Hundreds of thousands more were deported, never to return. At the war’s end Poland had more than a million orphans.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings