Review of A Train to Palestine: The Tehran Children, Anders’ Army and their Escape from Stalin’s Siberia 1939-1943 by Randy Grigsby, published by Vallentine Mitchell, pp.271 History is often written in cold sentences, but not in this book. Randy Grigsby’s popular account in A Train to Palestine relates the harrowing story of one small Jewish … Read more
Hosni Mubarak’s long life encompassed the history of both modern Egypt and modern Israel. A young pilot serving in King Farouk’s forces, he embraced the revolution of 1952 which ousted the monarchy and brought the Free Officers Movement to power. The dominance of the military through its leaders — Mohamed Neguib, Gamal Abdul Nasser and … Read more
Review of Chris Millington’s A History of Fascism in France: From the First World War to the National Front published by Bloomsbury 2020, pp. 235 In 1995, President Jacques Chirac stated that France was responsible for the Vel’ d’Hiv round-up of Jews in 1942. In 2018, Marine Le Pen, president of the Front National, attributed … Read more
The emergence of Sinn Féin as a major political force in last week’s election in Ireland is a watershed in the onward march of Irish republicanism towards a united Ireland. Like the Conservatives on the mainland, dissatisfied voters who felt left behind deserted the major parties and turned to Sinn Féin. Even so, like the … Read more
During the last decade of his life, Qassem Soleimani emerged from the shadows and was promoted as a noble and self-effacing warrior, an Iranian Napoleon who would recreate a new Persian empire — a Shia crescent from Mashad near Turkmenistan to the Mediterranean in Lebanon. Soleimani’s story was that he was recognised as a military … Read more
Two weeks ago, Mario Sandoval, a professor at the Sorbonne’s Institute of Latin American Studies, was finally extradited to Argentina after a seven-year legal fight. In a former life, he had been a police officer during the military junta then assigned to unit 3.3.2 at Escuela de Mecanica de la Armada, the naval college known … Read more
Labour’s crushing defeat in last Thursday’s election is the party’s worst performance since 1935. It is undoubtedly an ideological watershed, a political upheaval on a par with the 1945 Labour victory of the reforming post-war party under Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 victory marking the ascendency of hard-nosed Conservatives. Commentators were forced to consult … Read more
The remarkable revelation that Jeremy Corbyn — as part of a Palestine Return Centre (PRC) mission to Beirut in 2011 — met representatives of Palestinian rejectionist factions is further evidence of his fundamentalism when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict. It meant that he had no qualms sitting with those opposed to the PLO, those who refused … Read more
Review of Trinity by Frank Close, Published by Allen Lane 2019, pp. 528 Thirty years after his death in Communist East Germany, the saga of the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs still astonishes. The author of Trinity, Frank Close, a distinguished professor of theoretical physics, has forensically dissected this story with nuance and insight.Fuchs came of … Read more
The Road from Kristallnacht: Unlearning the Past Seventy-Five years ago tomorrow, on 12 November 1944, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle laid a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. It commemorated the multitudes who had fallen during World War I. Churchill, De Gaulle and many others … Read more