1 JANUARY 1983, Page 24

Simon Courtauld

Jacobo Timerman's The Longest War (Chatto & Windus and Picador) is a remarkable indictment, by a Jew living in Israel, of the Begin government for pro- secuting the war in Lebanon. His charge against Begin is that he is destroying Israel's democratic ideology (Timerman witnessed a similar process in Argentina, where he was imprisoned and tortured); against General Sharon that he is responsible for turning Israel's defence forces, for the first time since 1948, into an instrument of aggres- sion. In White Mischief (Jonathan Cape) James Fox conducts an absorbing investiga- tion into the Happy Valley murder of Lord Erroll in Kenya in 1941. It is hard to quarrel with Mr Fox's conclusion, but I have the feeling that he has left one or two stones un- turned: were Jack Soames and/or June Carberry wholly innocent of complicity in the crime? George Orwell's Burmese Days (Penguin), which I have read for the first time, is notable for the author's vivid description of scenery.