Category Archives: Book Review

Operation Chiffon, by Peter Taylor

Posted on by
1

Summary: An indispensable channel, but not the Peace Process

Operation Chiffon is Peter Taylor’s account of the “Back Channel”: the secret line of communication maintained intermittently between the British government and the IRA from the 1970s into the Peace Process. 

Taylor focuses particularly on the MI6 officer Michael Oatley, his MI5 successor, known only as Robert, and their principal intermediary, Brendan Duddy, a Derry businessman.

It is an engaging story, worth telling not least to honour the courage and persistence of those who kept open the possibility of dialogue while the conflict continued. Uncovering its details has been a journalistic project of several decades for Taylor, and he tells the clandestine story extremely well.

Perhaps because he has invested so much in uncovering it, however, Taylor also invests too much historical importance in it. In his telling, the Back Channel becomes not merely one important element of the Peace Process but its decisive mechanism. Indeed, he endorses the contention that without it there would have been no Peace Process.

The wider political architecture receives remarkably little attention. Hume’s three-stranded approach to a settlement, the New Ireland Forum, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, Hume–Adams and the Downing Street Declaration are either treated briefly or relegated to the margins. The constitutional significance of the Anglo-Irish Agreement—giving the Irish government an institutional role in the affairs of a territory claimed as an integral part of the United Kingdom—is scarcely explored. Hume–Adams is also downplayed, on the highly dubious grounds that Martin McGuinness was more central than Gerry Adams to the republican movement’s strategic leadership: McGuinness was the Back Channel’s principal IRA interlocutor.

This mistakes access for authorship. The fact that McGuinness managed a crucial line of communication does not establish that the line itself generated the republican strategy or the political settlement. The Back Channel could communicate intentions, test propositions and build confidence. It could not, by itself, create the political circumstances in which an IRA ceasefire became possible.

Taylor gives particular weight to Robert’s assurance to McGuinness that the eventual outcome of the conflict would be Irish unity. Robert confirms that he expressed this view, apparently going beyond his instructions. Taylor presents the exchange as a decisive moment.

It may certainly have mattered. Coming from someone understood to represent the British government, it could reassure the republican leadership that Britain would not permanently obstruct constitutional change if consent for unity could eventually be secured. But that is different from supposing that Robert’s personal prediction transformed republican strategy. It is more plausible that his words corroborated conclusions already emerging from electoral experience, Hume–Adams, contacts with Dublin and the developing relationship between the British and Irish governments.

Seen within the totality of relationships that produced the Peace Process, corroboration appears to have been the Back Channel’s principal function. The British wanted to establish whether Irish government and SDLP assurances—that an inclusive political process could draw republicans away from violence—were credible. The IRA, in turn, wanted to know whether the political inclusion and constitutional openness promised by Hume and others would actually be delivered once it ended its campaign.

Republican caution was understandable. The movement had emerged from the 1975 ceasefire convinced that it had been induced to suspend its campaign, weakened in the process and offered no corresponding political advance. Whether or not that had been the British government’s deliberate intention, it became a powerful lesson within republican strategy: a ceasefire without reliable political guarantees could become a trap.

As a mechanism of mutual assurance, therefore, the Back Channel was extremely important. It allowed each side to test the seriousness of the other without public commitment and gave messages an authority that informal political contacts might have lacked. 

But a channel is not the same thing as the process whose messages it carries. Without the political framework developed through the work of Hume and many others, there would have been little for Oatley, Robert or Duddy to communicate. Taylor has written a compelling account of one indispensable strand of the Peace Process. His mistake is to treat that strand as the fabric itself.

Here Where We Live Is Our Country, by Molly Crabapple

Posted on by
2

Summary: Recovering a forgotten Jewish history, vital for our times

At the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism emerged both as a response to European antisemitism and, in a fundamental way, as an acceptance of one of antisemitism’s central claims: that Jews could never truly belong in Europe. Its answer was a Jewish “homeland,” ultimately to be established in Palestine, with catastrophic consequences for the people already living there. After the briefly entertained East Africa scheme, the Balfour Declaration gave imperial force to this idea, helping to condemn Palestinians to dispossession in the name of Jewish refuge.

Among the earliest and most strenuous opponents of this idea were European Jews themselves. For example, Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India in Lloyd George’s British government, while perhaps not an opponent of colonialism per se, was a fierce opponent of Zionism, viewing it as an antisemitic concept that would jeopardize the status of Jews in Britain. 

In Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple focuses on a different group of Jewish anti-Zionists: the Bund – the name translates from German or Yiddish as “union” – a Jewish social democratic movement that grew in Eastern Europe, particularly in the old Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. The Bund, as Crabapple shows, was fiercely opposed to colonialism and rejected Zionism’s plain implication that Jews should answer European exclusion by displacing others. Instead they insisted that their culture, including the Yiddish language and literature, should be nourished and respected in the countries in which they lived. For decades they organized to achieve this. 

There is an echo of Mark Kurlansky’s Basque History of the World in Crabapple’s gripping work. Both books show how a people often treated as peripheral profoundly shaped wider political history.. In the case of the Bund, Crabapple traces their influence from the Russian Revolution, where they allied with the Mensheviks, to resistance against the Nazis alongside the Polish Socialist Party, and finally to the radical Jewish politics of New York City that formed part of the coalition behind Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty..

Like Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, it is also a book that made me rethink large portions of history that I had previously thought myself relatively familiar with. For example, no other history of Eastern Europe that I have read – even Timothy Snyder’s superb Bloodlands – has quite so forensically itemized the scale of antisemitic atrocity that plagued Eastern Europe from the end of the First World War to the destruction of Warsaw. 

But, in describing all of this, Crabapple’s purpose is not special pleading to show antisemitic atrocity as something unique. Rather she strives to show, as Seamus Heaney reflected, that all “Human beings suffer,/ They torture one another./ They get hurt and get hard.” And so, Zionism was born as a result of European violence and, as the Jews suffered in Europe, so the Palestinians now continue to suffer at the hands of the state and settlement project that Zionism produced. Palestinian armed groups have also committed atrocities, sometimes with comparable levels of cruelty, though without comparable power. This will inevitably continue until the cycle of violence can be broken. 

The Bund sought to break this cycle through solidarity. That they lost, in the face of the monstrousness of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany does not negate their message. As Crabapple writes, “solidarity is fragile and frequently betrayed, but it is all we have. It is the only thing that can save us. There is no other earth after all. We are trapped together on this one. It belongs to us all as an inheritance and prison.” The alternative is the morality of the bully with the strong doing what they wish, while the weak endure what they must. 

Molly Crabapple’s book is an outstanding work of narrative history, elegantly written, compelling and deeply moving – it made me cry more than once. It is a fierce assertion that another world is possible in which we all try to take care of each other instead of honouring the worst instincts of the cruel and the greedy.  

The Shortest History of Ireland, by James Hawes

Posted on by
Reply

Summary: “… in this great future we can’t forget our past, so dry your tears I say…”

Perhaps not quite as arresting as his Shortest History of Germany, but James Hawes Shortest History of Ireland is an exquisite thing. 

Rather than allow himself to lose narrative momentum, Hawes does, perhaps, skip over a few historical controversies – notably the impact of the Invincibles’ atrocity on the Kilmainham “Treaty”, and Collins role in the assassination of Henry Wilson. But the overall coherence of that narrative, his rigorous attention to evidence, the entertainment of his storytelling and the elegance of the prose are exceptional.

It is refreshing to see proper attention given to the role of Hume in the peace process. This has become something of a rarity in recent accounts which tend to emphasise the parallel squalid spooky shenanigans that some English writers (yes I do mean Peter Taylor!) like to dubiously  assert were central. 

This is immediately the best concise history of Ireland available anywhere. So, it is nice that it concludes on a hopeful note albeit one that must be underpinned by caution: Irish reunification is now inevitable. 

To grasp the full potential of this demands careful planning, perhaps aiming for a new federal constitution based on the four provinces. The current Dublin-centric model of government hordes power in the very way the English did during their colonial exploitation of the island to the continuing detriment of those living “beyond the Pale.”

So, if this book has a moral it’s that if today’s Irish politicians don’t rapidly reconvene the New Ireland Forum to gather evidence and plan for the future, then they will deserve every iota of historical ignominy that will inevitably be heaped upon them. 

Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon

Posted on by
Reply

Summary: Theatre in a theatre of brutal war.

Glorious Exploits is something of a literary first cousin to Michael Hughes’ superb Country, a retelling of the Iliad transposed to the mountains of South Armagh during the Troubles. 

Like Hughes, Lennon tells his story of the ancient world in an Irish vernacular – Dublish, in this instance – and the result is a comparable dark magic that brings to unsettling life a barbarous moment from humanity’s bleak history. 

In the aftermath of the collapse of the Athenian invasion of Sicily two literature loving Syracuse potters, Lampo, the narrator, and his childhood pal, Gelon, take to visiting the prisoners, exchanging food for snatches of Euripides. After a while Gelon has the idea of staging a full production of Euripides’ masterpieces Medea, and his new play, The Trojan Women, with the doomed Athenian prisoners in the quarry where they are quartered. 

Though his motives are never fully explained, one gets the sense that Gelon hopes to provoke an empathy for the prisoners similar to that Euripides encourages his audiences to feel for his tragic protagonists. This, perhaps, might save both some prisoners and a threatened portion of Syracuse’s soul as it hovers on the edge of a monumental war crime.  

The story is based on a true episode in the ghastly Peloponnesian War, and Lennon’s imaginative exploration of it in turn seeks to provoke in the reader an empathy for the long-dead, and help understanding that war’s pities are a constant in human history.  

Glorious Exploits is a wonderful book. 

The August Uprising, 1924: The Georgian Anti-Soviet Revolt and the Birth of Democratic Socialism, by Eric Lee

Posted on by
Reply

Summary: an account of how an abortive insurrection in Georgia irrevocably split the Left

There is an anecdote in Cyril Cusack’s short book, The Humour is on Me, about a TV cameraman filming pro-British, loyalist, rioting in Belfast during the 1970s. The unfortunate journalist was set upon by a woman armed with an umbrella, offended by the fact that he was “filming things that were not actually happening.”

Similar attitudes have surfaced in other wars and conflicts before and since, including the Bolshevik onslaught on Georgia, the subject of Eric Lee’s The August Uprising. This fine book recounts the doomed 1924 revolt against Soviet rule and the moral choices it exposed, which ultimately divided the socialist movement itself.

Lee shows how those habits of denial, later seen on the streets of Belfast, flourished among Stalin’s defenders. He records some particularly shameful examples of propaganda from apologists for whom partisan loyalty mattered more than facts, decency, or human life.

Lee’s book follows the chronology of Georgian history, roughly from the outset of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, through the overthrow of the government of Georgia in 1921 to the bloody crushing of Georgian independence efforts in 1924. In describing the machinations of the Bolsheviks, Lee shows that the brute force used by Stalin and his associates in suppressing Georgian independence prefigured later atrocities, including Stalin’s murderous assault on the Russian people, the Holodomor in Ukraine, and the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn.

What makes Lee’s account compelling is not simply its chronicling of another crushed national movement, but its portrayal of a deeper struggle, between democratic socialism and the totalitarian impulses that would consume it.

While the facts on the ground created by battles, torture chambers and execution grounds may have been decisive in establishing the nature of many Eastern European societies, the ideas that diverse leaders used to justify such violence were also of vital importance to many. 

Trotsky, writing an introduction to one such work, noted it was composed “in the car of a military train and amid the flames of civil war.” One suspects that, as commander of the Red Army, he might have had more urgent matters than writing a work of political philosophy. But perhaps reassuring himself of his righteousness helped him sleep at night.

Stalin, of course, needed no such soporifics, and his own writing may have amounted to little more than execution lists. Yet, even as the corpses mounted he still had enough useful idiots, including on one occasion a delegation from the British TUC, to obey and reassert the Party’s final, most essential command, as Orwell put it, to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” 

Such fantasy-island politics can endure only so long in the face of atrocity. Eventually there must be a reckoning. In Lee’s telling, the suppression of Georgia and its social democratic movement became an object lesson for the entire European Left, showing that there could be no meaningful alliance between democratic socialists and the “red fascists”, as the German communist Otto Ruhle branded the Bolsheviks. 

That lesson has lost none of its relevance. The temptation to mistake ideology for truth, and moral certainty for moral rightness, remains as potent as ever

The Cut Throat Trial, by the Secret Barrister

Posted on by
Reply

Summary: One of these suspects is not like the others …

As aficionados of Rumpole will know, a “cut-throat” trial is one in which co-defendants turn on each other. That is the heart of this novel about three boys accused of murder — a case that also involves a victim nearly decapitated, so there is that sort of throat-cutting too.

This is the first foray into fiction by the Secret Barrister. It is told from multiple perspectives: a defense and the prosecution barrister, the judge, and two of the defendants. Each voice feels distinct, a technical feat that lends the narrative both texture and credibility.

As in their non-fiction, the Secret Barrister’s abiding concerns with the state of the law, society, and the criminal justice system in England and Wales permeate every chapter. Like Wendy Joseph’s Unlawful Killings, it exposes the squalid tragedies of murder committed by children.

Yet for all its artistic achievement and political undercurrent, this is first and foremost a courtroom thriller — and it is a cracking one. It takes a staple of English literature, the red-herring-strewn cosy murder mystery, and serves it up American-hard-boiled. Gone are the familiar comforts of Agatha Christie and the nostalgia-fests of Richard Osman. Instead, we are in a world where the streets are mean, knives wound horrifically, killing is messy, dying is sore, cops and lawyers are flawed, defendants are pathetic, and justice is too often elusive.

By refusing to flinch from the grotesque realities of murder, the Secret Barrister has produced a novel several cuts above much contemporary English crime fiction, and one that, like the best of literature, illuminates the human condition while laying bare some of the failings of our world.

The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome, by Robin Lane Fox

Posted on by
Reply

Summary: a survey of Greece and the Roman Empire from Homer to Hadrian

Robin Lane Fox may, for want of space, skim over some important subjects, such as the Peloponnesian War or the Year of the Four Emperors (69 AD BTW). But The Classical World is still a lucid and engaging narrative, and an excellent introduction to the sweep of that whole period of history.

It’s depressing to think that after some 2,500 years of history humanity has little changed: the abject supplication that the UK displays towards the US shows what empires expect of their vassals is little changed in millennia; today privileged poshos still think as little of committing genocide on foreigns as did democratic Athens or autocratic Rome.

But, as Lane Fox notes, some of the ideas from this time notably those of Socrates and particularly Jesus, offer a more hopeful ideal for humanity.

Given the depths to which western civilisation has sunk at this point in time, Jesus’ imperative to love our neighbours as ourselves still has a lot of heavy lifting to do.

The Benefactors, by Wendy Erskine

Posted on by
Reply

Summary: A powerful and timely novel of violence and its apologists.

Wendy Erskine developed her deserved literary reputation with her mastery of the short story form. In those she showed a remarkable ability to help the reader understand even the most unpleasant-seeming of her characters, and an eerie talent for convincingly rendering those diverse voices. 

It is a delight to see that those traits are all still present and correct in The Benefactors, Erskine’s first novel, an exploration of four families in Belfast drawn together by an act of violence. 

To say too much more would be, I feel, unfair to the book, which allows its compelling plot to emerge from the cacophonous voices of its characters as they reflect on their seemingly ordinary, imperfect lives. But it is a dreadfully timely work coming, as it does, in the midst of what seems like a pandemic of violence against women and girls in the North of Ireland. 

Like her earlier short stories, Erskine shows a deep appreciation of Belfast’s pitch black humour. She also shows a considerable generosity of spirit in trying to understand rather than judge her characters, as they themselves struggle to understand their own lives in which the banal has been shattered by the hideous.

Paradoxically perhaps, in telling her story in the way she choses, Erskine confronts the reader all the more powerfully with an insight on how the toleration of grotesquely unacceptable behaviour in the name of love and family, allows the poison to spread.

The Benefactors is an important book, exquisitely written. It should be recommended reading in all the schools of Ireland.

Original Sin: President Biden’s decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson

Posted on by
Reply

Summary: American Hastings Banda

On a human level, this book is a very sad one. Across it, informants repeatedly refer to how their encounters with Joe Biden in the later stages of his presidency reminded them of their own impaired elderly relatives. Indeed, the descriptions of Biden’s deterioration within this book reminded me more than once of my father’s decline.

Of course, devastating as that was, I can be confident that no matter how afflicted my father became, unlike Biden, he would never have added his support to a genocide. 

I counted four references to the violence in Palestine across this book, starting with a brief mention of the Hamas atrocity on 7 October 2023, and ending with another brief mention that Biden’s Gaza policy was the area of most substantial disagreement, in private, between Biden and his Vice President Kamala Harris. 

This lack of discussion of one of the great moral issues of our day is, perhaps, unsurprising. Tapper and Thompson’s interests, like those of most Americans, are wholly US-centric. For them American preoccupations are paramount. And so they focus on the threat to American democracy posed by Biden’s cogitative decline and the opportunities that this gave to a resurgent Trump. They are uninterested in consequences of the moral collapse in international affairs of Biden and the swathes of the US political establishment that were their sources for this book. That doesn’t directly affect Americans.

This is somewhat disingenuous. There are occasional references through the book to Biden’s loss of support amongst young people. This is attributed solely to Biden’s age. Tapper and Thompson do not consider the possibility that abject disgust at Biden’s support for a racist and genocidal government in Israel could have deprived Harris of the small margins she needed in key battleground states to keep the presidency out of Trump’s hands.

In many respects Original Sin is a fine work of investigative reporting, and it does give important insight into the nature of power in the United States: Biden’s presidency gave power to a small cadre of advisers around him known, behind their backs at least, as the Politbureau. It was in this group’s selfish interest to deny to the world the fact that Biden was no longer physically or mentally fit to be president. To have done otherwise would have been a surrender of the power that they craved.

But the authors’ disinterest in the most murderous of Biden’s policies is reflective of one of the two original sins of the United States: that it was built on genocide and that many in the highest echelons of government still seem to regard this as a legitimate policy option. As a republic it has never quite grasped that human rights are meant to be universal. 

Given this, it is difficult sometimes not to feel that in some grand Karmic way the United States deserves Trump: they reap now for themselves what they sowed so long for others.

The Tainted, by Cauvery Madhavan

Posted on by
1

Summary: an elegant exploration of Hiberno-Indian relations over the decades

While anti-colonialism is now deeply culturally embedded in contemporary Ireland, our history on the matter, as Cauvery Madhavan gently reminds us with this book, is rather more complicated. 

The Tainted takes as its starting point a fictionalized story of a 1920 mutiny by Irish troops in India. (In the book the “Kildare” rather than the Connaught Rangers are the mutineers).

Because, superficially, the British and Irish are white, the British expect the Irish to collaborate with them in treating the Indians in the way that the British treat the Irish at home.

By and large the Irish are happy to comply. But when news of the depredations of the Black and Tans percolates through to the Irish barracks the centre cannot hold, and the colonial authorities are murderously provoked when Irish soldiers down arms in protest.

The second two-thirds of the book explore the repercussions from this incident down the years, not least for Rose, a young “Anglo-Indian” woman – daughter of an Irish father and an Indian mother. 

Cleverly Madhavan does not allow her narrative to rest with any single character for too long.  Instead she shifts the psychological perspective of the novel across a range of characters into the first decades of Indian independence. By doing this she gives insight into the attitudes and prejudices of different communities, and shows how these pose needless challenges to the appreciation of each other’s common humanity. 

Madhavan’s novel is an engaging and illuminating exploration of identity, cultures and history, elegantly written and ultimately hopeful. After all, whatever our skin, our blood is the same colour.