David Prycejones

The first 100 or so pages of this book almost made me give up, so saccharine is the description of the childhoods of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, with even a reference to the latter’s ‘dear diary’. I am glad I persisted. Mills and Boon duly evolves into Kraft-Ebbing. Carole Seymour-Jones may assert that she continues to admire this pair, but she has laid the foundations of a demolition job from which they should not recover. The relationship between these two goes back to a compact in 1929 whereby they decided to have a union but not a marriage. In practice, conflating love with sexual freedom, they deceived themselves, preyed upon their innocent victims, and persuaded many people in the wider world that their nihilism was really a philosophy for the times.

Listing page content here To meet Oswald Mosley was a most unpleasant experience. You knew at once that you were in the presence of someone who had lost touch with everything except his own ego. So he bullied, so he lied, denying that he had been a willing agent of Hitler, that he would have proved a Quisling in the event of a German invasion in 1940, or that he had ever been an anti-Semite. On a television programme with him once, I read out some of the foul things he had said on platforms in the Thirties; his eyes turned red with rage, and I saw that he would have done violence to me if he could. If I did not suppress the book I had written about his sister-in-law Unity Mitford, Mosley and his lawyers threatened, they would not be responsible for the consequences.

Prospect is a monthly magazine with high aims, and it is therefore welcome. To borrow from the old advertisement for Mars Bars, it fills the gap. It is hard to think of any comparable outlet in this country — as opposed to the United States — where it is possible to publish contributions of 5,000 words and upwards. David Goodhart had the idea of it, raised the money and is the editor. Top marks for all that, with excuses for the horribly arch pun in the title of this selection from ten years of publication. A monthly magazine of this kind ideally promotes its version of right opinion, and scotches its version of wrong opinion. T. S. Eliot’s Criterion, Cyril Connolly’s Horizon, or F. R.

Mustapha Kemal, otherwise Ataturk, took the corpse of the Ottoman empire and re- animated it as Turkey. Break-ing both the old sultanate and the hold of Islam, he laid the foundation of a democratic state. It was an extraordinary achievement, not to be witnessed again until Mikhail Gorbachev broke the Soviet Union and the hold of the Communist party — and that was more by accident than design. In 1950 Turkey became the first Muslim country in history to replace its government through a free election. Politics since then, it is true, have been more a matter of strong personality than party and platform. As the guardian of Kemalist secular and nationalist virtues, the army has staged three coups. One unfortunate prime minister, Adnan Menderes, was hanged.

When not thinking and writing, Richard Pipes tells us in these memoirs, he is at a loose end. At different times he had ambitions to be an art historian or perhaps a musicologist, he also says, but settled to be a historian. The writing of history depends in the first place on scholarship. Vixi is the work of a man of immense learning, whose apposite quotations range through several classical and modern literatures from Praxilla of Sicyon in the fifth century BC and Seneca all the way to Trollope, Guizot and Sainte-Beuve. But selection of facts rests ultimately on the historian’s humanity and aesthetic sense. Most unusually, Vixi is also the work of an intellectual for whom beauty is truth, and truth beauty.

Algeria is one of the most pitiful of failed Arab states. For ten years and more, the news has been coming in regularly that people somewhere in that country have been butchered. Qui tue qui? is the question Algerians themselves ask. Here is a civil war, all the more sinister for being undeclared and undefined. The ruling elite control the Front de LibZration National, the FLN, and the army, and they say that the killers are Islamists, extremists from the Front Islamique du Salut, the FIS. The Islamists counter-claim that the FLN and the army are responsible for atrocities. The truth is unobtainable, but seemingly all parties are guilty. There are at least 100,000 victims - twice as many by some estimates. Things ought to have turned out better.