Culture

Adam Sisman is sensitive to the charge that a book about an author’s unknown mistresses is simply an exercise in prurience. ‘I am not one of those who believes sex explains everything,’ he declares defensively. An affair with the wife of a close friend led to the ménage depicted in The Naive and Sentimental Lover But this admirably concise volume justifies its title. Sub-themes such as the practice and ethics of biography, and the emotional toll taken by spying, run through it. But its core relates how, when writing his 2015 life of David Cornwell (John le Carré’s real name.) Sisman was prevailed upon to delete details of his subject’s many extramarital affairs.

‘The boy Stirling is quite mad, quite, quite mad. However, in a war there is often a place for mad people.’ Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was referring to David Stirling, the man largely credited with raising the Special Air Service (SAS) in the summer of 1941. Myth has always surrounded the formation of the SAS and one of the most abiding legends is that it was down to one man alone, David Stirling, whose L Detachment of six officers and 60 men grew into 1SAS. Gavin Mortimer’s vivid and meticulously researched book, 2SAS, does a good deal to redress the balance. It acknowledges the importance – too long overlooked – of David’s eldest brother, Bill Stirling, who was to command 2SAS, and other remarkable men who were among the SAS’s founding fathers.

Israelophobia addresses an anti-Semitic mutation ‘evolving out of reach’: the demonisation of the Jewish state. Its author, Jake Wallis Simons, is the editor of the Jewish Chronicle. His antennae are primed for anti-Semitism and he finds plenty of it. In France, 60 per cent of religious abuse is directed at Jews and in Germany anti-Semitic incidents have doubled in a decade. In his telling, Israelophobia – Leon Pinsker’s Judeophobia transformed – is the descendant of the deicide myth, the blood libel and the Shoah. Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was a fanatical admirer of Hitler You can hear it in the quality and narrowness of the discourse, he notes. Liberal Zionism is considered no less murderous by anti-Zionists than Greater Israelism.

In Whitehall, visible to even the most short-sighted from the gates of Downing Street, stands an outsize statue of Lord Alanbrooke, the strategic adviser to Winston Churchill during the second world war. His job was to help the prime minister see the big picture and concentrate on the decisions that really mattered. This was no easy task. Churchill was both a tricky master and ‘tinkerman’, but Alanbrooke had Ulster blood and knew how to say no. One little village, San Pietro Infine, took more than a week and 1,500 American casualties to capture He also had a remarkable facility for explaining complex strategic problems in simple terms. There is good evidence of this in the BBC archive (and on YouTube) in a television interview he gave in 1957.