Jonathan Mirsky

After the Morecambe Bay Hospital scandal a new era opens of compassion, -whistle-blowing, naming names and possible prosecutions. But what about 70-odd years of harming children in ‘care’ homes, and prisoners, with toxin injections, -radioactive blasts, electro-shocks to the brain and frontal lobotomies — all done in the interests of medical advance by leading American doctors and scientists, one of whom was -awarded a Nobel Prize? Furthermore, what if the CIA sponsored such work in the interest of defending the US against Soviet threats?

If you are considering adopting — that is, buying — a Chinese baby girl, recycling a television or computer, or buying a Vuiton bag, think again. Ma Jian, author of the startling Beijing Coma, prepared for this evocative and sometimes horrifying novel by travelling through Chinese regions few tourists see. There he encountered some of the millions of women who had just given birth to babies declared illegal by the one-child family laws, which were taken away and sold by corrupt officials to rich foreigners eager to adopt. He saw, too, the effects on the poor migrants who disassemble our unwanted televisions and computers and poison themselves by handling the toxic parts.

As someone slightly older than Al Alvarez, and also a regular swimmer — although not in the ice-edged Hampstead Heath pools into which he dived for over 60 years — I was initially disappointed by this book. For the first half it repeats too often the pleasures of extremity-numbing, cold, outdoor swimming when one is old. Alvarez’s outer and inner selves, in the first five or six years of this ten-year journal, rejoice with the ecstasy of swimming almost daily in water preferably just a few degrees above freezing, feeling the zing when he climbs out pink as a lobster and banters with the lifeguards. But then, slowly and horrifyingly, he charts the not-so-gradual collapse of his once super-fit body.

At last! At the age of 80, I have read my first digital book. According to Penguin, these brief ‘Specials’ are written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, in your lunch hour or between dinner and bedtime, a short escape into a fictional world or ... as a primer in a particular field, or to provide a new angle on an old subject. You can read on the move or in a spare moment for less than the price of a cup of coffee. So what do you get from this Special? John Garnaut, an Australian journalist who specialises in Chinese affairs, describes here, in steamy prose foreshadowed by the sub-title, an example of the self-cannibalism that has wracked most communist regimes, and certainly the Chinese Communist Party almost since its founding in 1921.

I like Jewish jokes. I begin every conversation with the literary editor of The Spectator with one or two, do the same with the judge across the road, and tell my newest joke to the lifeguards at the local swimming pool. The key to a good one is gentle self-mockery. But I dislike reading jokes and listening to them from non-Jews, who invariably tell them badly. But if you like Jewish jokes written down, dozens and dozens of them, and you think Michael Winner a witty fellow, then this is the book for you. Better skip the introduction, though, because in it Winner reveals what he thinks is really funny. ‘Some of the funniest stories I have heard,’ he writes, were in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

Having lived for 15 years in Japan, Lesley Downer has already written several highly informed books with Japanese themes. For her most famous, Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World, she spent six months with those artful women who make every man they entertain with song, dance and chat feel adored, without — usually — going further than that. I found Downer’s novels readable but not especially memorable. Now she has written a really good novel, suffused with the atmosphere of Japan in the late 19th century — when westernising influences were begin to penetrate its traditional culture — and populated with believable characters, whose fates are not settled until the last few suspenseful pages.

Never write blurbs. That is my modest advice to Sir Harold Evans, who in his endorsement of Muckraker describes the life of W.T. Stead as ‘ennobling’. This is particularly odd because Stead (1849-1912) was the shameless precursor of the gutter journalism that Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World and Sun have inflicted on the UK — something that Sir Harold, once editor of Murdoch’s classier Times, knows all too well.

Not bad, this life. Now 95, Bernard Lewis, is recognised everywhere as a leading historian of the Middle East.He is the author of 32 books, translated into 29 languages, able in 15 languages, consulted by popes, kings, presidents and sheiks, on good or argumentative terms with many Western and Middle Eastern scholars and politicians, husband more than once, father, grandfather, and — true love at 80! — partner of the joint author of this book. He speaks with authority, although he is often disputed and occasionally sued, on so many different matters that his frequent name- and award-dropping somehow don’t exasperate. A non-observant English Jew, Lewis has visited most of the countries of the Middle East, even those that from time to time forbade Jews from entry.

The authors of this book have attempted a difficult thing: to ‘write about something that could never be known’. Here is a terrific and scary story about a group of American, British and European trekkers kidnapped by jihadists in Kashmir in July 1995 and slaughtered in December. Their wives were allowed to go free, and one of the men escaped. Another was decapitated. Four were reportedly, but only reportedly, shot dead. At the book’s core, the authors remark, ‘is an event that only one person survived’. The original purpose of the kidnap was to force the Indian government to free a number of prisoners, principally Masood Azhara, a key crony of Osama bin Laden.

Does anyone do derring-do anymore? Here’s the real thing. On Christmas Day 1941, despite Churchill’s call to fight to the last man, Hong Kong fell to the Japanese, the first British possession to surrender since the American War of Independence. Within a few hours, Chiang Kai-shek’s main official in the colony, the one-legged Admiral Chan Chak, together with three of his staff, several senior British officials and a few others, fled the colony under heavy Japanese fire and managed to reach a little flotilla of motor torpedo boats manned by 50 British sailors.