ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
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Visionary guides in times of violence
What better guide for our times, say FIONA O’CONNOR than the example of remarkable women who thought through the experience of WWII
HORROR IN GAZA: Palestinians pray over a mass grave, in Khan Younis, of the bodies of their dead brought from Shifa hospital last Wednesday. Hannah Arendt foresaw these outcomes and was furious at the Zionist movement’s 1942 resolutions to model an ethnically homogeneous Jewish nation-state in Israel
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MICK McSHANE rubs shoulders with Mod legend Steve Craddock and joins in with the joyous Glasgow choir
DENNIS BROE sifts out the ideological bias of the newest TV series offerings, and picks out what to see, and what to avoid
The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Salvation of Philosophy
Wolfram Eilenberger, Allen Lane, £25
COMING in this time of war The Visionaries offers insights into the human capacity to think through violence.
Remarkable women caught up in the second world war totalitarian machine: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil are Jewish women fleeing the Gestapo; French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir is trapped in Vichy France. These women’s experiences are captured in this group biography along with radical ideas that shaped a century, born from painful comprehension of human atrocity.
And somehow (bestseller) Ayn Rand gets in the mix; a Russian-Jewish refugee from Stalinism, her writing is shamefully exposed for its inadequacy when read next to the others.
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