Lyndsey Stonebridge’s biography of the US political theorist illuminates the titanic forces of love and evil which animate civilisation - be it the second World War or now. It is timely and magisterial
Daniel Finkelstein, probably best known for his political and football journalism in The Times, has now written a remarkable and deeply moving memoir about how his mother (a German Jew) and his father (a Polish Jew) somehow managed to survive the horrors inflicted by the Germans and the Russians during the Second World War. It is not a surprise that the BBC has chosen it as one of its Books of the Week. While written and published before the recent outbreak of shocking violence in the Middle East precipitated by the massacres carried out by Hamas, it nonetheless provides a relevant backdrop to and partial explanation of the reactions and responses both of individual Israelis and of the Israeli state. The book is a labour of love that pays well-deserved tribute not just to his parents but also to his grandparents who made their survival possible. That any of them survived when the majority of those around them did not was partly down to luck but mostly to a combination of bloody-minded
Sir, Daniel Finkelstein warns the Tories that Labour might now become the “natural party of government” by appealing to a broad, national, gradualist, progressive and modernising liberal agenda (“How