A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity

Edited by Anne Karpf, Brian Klug, Jacqueline Rose and Barbara Rosenbaum

Verso, 310pp, £9.99

Journey to Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land

Eva Figes

Granta Books, 184pp, £14.99

Plowshares Into Swords: From Zionism to Israel

Arno J Mayer

Verso, 432pp, £19.99

The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel

Gabriel Piterberg

Verso, [...]

Bad Blood: the Secret Life of the Tour de FranceJeremy WhittleYellow Jersey Press, 288pp, £12.99

Ten years ago, the Tour de France was about to start when the stunning news broke: the car of the Festina team, driven by Willy Voet, the Festina soigneur, or masseur-cum-minder (and, occasionally, masseur-cum-dealer), had been stopped at the French-Belgian border for a casual spot check. In Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, the customs official [...]

Even though he wasn't one himself, George Orwell used to say that the conservative pessimist has more opportuni-ties than others for saying "I told you so", given that most schemes for human betterment do in fact go wrong. Few writers today have been so unflaggingly pessimistic as "Theodore Dalrymple", the pseudonym of Dr Anthony Daniels.

He is a physician who has worked in Africa as well as in this country, [...]

One of the best things Bernard Levin ever wrote was an essay for the New Statesman in 1965 called: "Am I a Jew?" He knew the answer perfectly well, but he wanted to examine what "this means to me", as a man who did not believe in race and had neither any interest in Jewish culture (beyond a fondness for Jewish food and Jewish jokes) nor any religious belief. As [...]

Over the years, this magazine has known many ups and downs, vicissitudes and victories, grandeurs et servitudes, but there is one radiant moment which should be celebrated yearly. In 1927, a young writer was asked by Raymond Mortimer, the literary editor, to contribute fiction reviews to the New Statesman. V S Pritchett's debut was the beginning of a glorious 50-year tenure, and of one of the more inspiring literary careers [...]

When V S Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature three autumns ago, the committee nervously disclaimed any political significance in their choice, but that wasn't the whole truth. The work of Sir Vidia Naipaul (as he has been since 1990, having previously, we learnt from that recently leaked document, turned down the CBE) plainly has a political side. He has reported - or cast a cold eye - [...]

When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, the Viennese writer Karl Kraus tried to address the political and moral catastrophe, but could only find words of cosmic despair: "Mir fallt zu Hitler nichts ein" ("When I think of Hitler, nothing occurs to me", or "Hitler leaves me lost for words"). Ever since, generations of writers have been trying to make up for Kraus. Everything occurs to us about [...]

One of the books of our age waiting to be written could be called The Uses and Abuses of History. So many books, from the coarsest potboilers to seemingly scholarly works, hum with overtones and hidden political themes; so much "history" is nationalist propaganda in not very heavy disguise. Eric Hobsbawm's favourite example is a book that he came across called Five Thousand Years of Pakistan - this of a [...]

Why oh why is the popular press so hated? We have had cheap, mass-circulation newspapers in this country for just over a hundred years, since 1896 when Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, created the Daily Mail as the first national newspaper with an audience beyond the educated elite, and ever since that elite has been sneering at popular papers. But there has been one fascinating change over the century: the [...]

If one of those assertions easier made than checked is to be believed, more books have been written about Richard Wagner than any other man apart from Jesus and Napoleon. The most fanatical Wagnerian cannot complain of a shortage of reading matter, and those of us less fanatical may wonder how many more books we can take. But if there has to be another, Bryan Magee is the man to [...]