Alastair Forbes
A bitter loss to Europe and mankind in 1987 was that of Primo Levi, whose sudden plunge down the stairwell of his gloomy Turin apartment building marked his final defeat at the hands of what he himself had once called 'survivor's disease'. Though I had had my first moving encounter with If this is a Man and The Truce in Italy (whose schoolchildren now have their own edi- tions) I have re-read them with profit, and his other works, in the excellent Abacus- Sphere paperback translations now avail- able. For me Levi and Etty Hillesum, the Dutchwoman Auschwitz victim whose di- aries were my Christmas selection some years ago, remain the two people who have best succeeded in keeping KZ-Lager life ever pulsing in my heart and head. Etty Hillesum's letters have now been published and one of the last contains an unforgett- able request not to bother any more with sending parcels 'for the Frank family'.
On a different level of mankind's cruelty and folly, Prisoners of God (Quartet, £12.95) by the young journalist David Smith struck me as a remarkably fair assessment of bloody Arab-Israeli predica- ments, for which the English-speaking world can scarcely escape blame. This book certainly seems to have received less than its just deserts, perhaps because of its Palestinian publisher, whose own intermin- able tape-wormcasts engendered in the press almost as much further hype-tripe as they contained.
Despite the utter drivel about, amongst others, Harry Truman and Mikhail Gor- bachev with which he chose to drive Melvyn Bragg's television audience into deep paradoxical sleep, Gore Vidal re- mains a non-pareil essayist and critic and I enjoyed reading within hard covers some of his admirable New York Review of Books stuff and no less his latest piece of erudite US historical faction, Empire (Deutsch, £11.95).
From my Alpine attic in Switzerland, my road north takes me to Paris — and London — through that little-known cor- ner of France, the Jura, and past the turning that leads to the fabulous and ghost-ridden Château de Frontenay and the folk who live in its elephantine shadow, both quite marvellously evoked by Gael Elton Mayo, its chatelaine for a quarter of a century, in her splendidly idiosyncratic memoir The End of a Dream (Deutsch, £8.95).
Richard Lamb's Failure of the Eden Government (Sidgwick & Jackson, £16.95) went some way, though not far enough, to efface the memory of Robert Rhodes James's disingenuously inadequate 'autho- rised life' of its disastrous Prime Minister, where a widow's authority had evidently extinguished a historian's duty in a work inexplicably praised by Roy Jenkins no less, an Oxford Chancellor now himself elsewhere writing at the top of his stylish historian's form.
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