Last modified on Thu 11 Feb 2021 15.15 EST
The life of Naim Attallah, who has died aged 89, might have come from the pages of Balzac: he went from currency dealer to company director, racehorse-owner, film and theatre impresario, publisher, magazine proprietor, parfumier, chocolate-maker and – perhaps most importantly and controversially – author.
In the early 1970s, he fell in with John Asprey, heir to the luxury goods group, and under his patronage became joint managing director and eventually group chief executive, expanding the company greatly. On the way up Attallah acquired, independently, Quartet Books (1976), The Women’s Press (1977) and several magazines, including the Wire, the Oldie and the Literary Review, the last of which lost him, over time, an estimated £2.5m.
Dahl reviewed Tony Clifton’s book in 1983?
In 1983, Dahl had reviewed Tony Clifton’s ‘God Cried’, a picture book that described the
pain and suffering caused by the siege of West Beirut by the Israeli army incursion and occupation of Lebanon during the 1982 Lebanon War.
Published in the
Literary Review, Dahl said that “a race of people”, meaning the Jews, had never “switched so rapidly
from victims to barbarous murderers”, and that empathy for the Jewish people after the Holocaust had turned “into hatred and revulsion”.
America was “so utterly dominated by the great Jewish
financial institutions that they dare not defy the Israelis”.