After Trump | The Spectator

The doctor’s dilemma

The facts are stark, if little known. Before World War Two, the Jewish community of Thessaloniki, Greece (Salonica, in its old Ottoman name) numbered over 50,000. Jews were this Mediterranean port city’s most numerous ethnic minority and had shared in many of its past glories. When the war was over, only 5,000, less than 10 percent, of the Salonica Jews survived. Between March 15 and August 10, 1943, the local Greek police, supervised by the SS, arranged the deportation of 45,000 men, women and children in 19 convoys, most of them bound for death at Auschwitz-Birkenau. My grandmother’s family was among them. Talking Until Nightfall is a grim and gripping family saga. It compiles the testimonies of three generations of the Matarasso family.

James Delingpole

Office romance: I’m loving The Bureau

One of the many things I love about the horribly addictive French spy series The Bureau is that it never attempts to improve you with pious little homilies about how foreigners are just the same as us, with values just as worthy as our own, so they should be treated with the same amount of respect, for are we not all children of God? If The Bureau — about the DGSE, France’s equivalent of the CIA — had been made in the US, there would be a specially created nice, upstanding, Americanized Muslim character like the agent in The Looming Tower or the implausible black Muslim character in Jack Ryan.

Emily Rhodes

Rock, a hard place

‘It’s a woman’s thing, creation,’ says Sarah, a girl accused of witchcraft in 18th-century Scotland, in one of the three storylines in Evie Wyld’s powerful new novel. Sarah is pregnant, having been raped and nearly killed. She is looking at a piece of sacking sewn by a sister and mother and continues: ‘You can see how they felt in each stitch, you can hear the words they spoke to each other and into the cloth.’ The Bass Rock is in many ways an amplification of these words spoken into the cloth, a feminine counterforce to the masculine violence that pulses viscerally throughout.

Andrew L. Shea

Liberty and death: Jacob Lawrence’s struggle for freedom

Few artworks could be more responsive to the current upheaval than Jacob Lawrence’s 1954-56 series ‘Struggle...From the History of the American People’. Painted during the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, the cycle of 30 panels tells a history of the American Founding through punchy modernist vignettes, engaging with timely and timeless topics such as brutality, race, memory, justice and our shared national heritage. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 24 of the original panels have been reunited for the most complete exhibition of the series since its original showing more than six decades ago. The exhibition will travel to Birmingham, Seattle and Washington, DC from New York.

Philip Hensher

Know better

We live at a time of universal polymathy. We don’t know everything, but there’s not much difficulty in being able to discover any given truth. But it’s also worth remembering just how hard it used to be to find things out. Thirty years ago if you wanted to research it meant a trip to the public library — and perhaps filling out a form for an inter-library loan. Or you could try your luck in a bookshop, new or secondhand. The whole process took a long time, and most people stayed within their professional competence or enthusiasm, frankly admitting to ignorance outside those limits. It was the age of the specialist, memorably captured by Michael Frayn in Donkeys’ Years and the character of Kenneth Snell.

Titus Techera

We’re not going to take it — again

The everyday experience of 2020 includes televised demagogy and a national media making pure spectacle out of domestic terrorism and race riots. The less we believe what we see, the stranger the sights become. These experiences are also the story of Network, the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky/Sidney Lumet hit which won four Oscars out of its 10 nominations. We must ask ourselves why are we living out the 1970s again and, indeed, enacting its satire in deadly earnest. Marx said history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, but what did he know of Hollywood? A remake is the safest bet. We, however, have reversed Marx’s sequence.

Books & Arts