Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

The Making of Modern Israel 1948-1967 by Leslie Stein
Polity, £20

As extraordinary as it may seem to observers of the Middle East today, in the 19 years that followed the establishment of Israel in 1948 the Jewish state was viewed as the darling of liberal opinion. Not simply because it was one of the few enclaves of democratic socialism outside Western Europe but, having been almost strangled at birth, and faced with repeated threats of annihilation, devoid of a superpower alliance and occupying a minute area of land the size of Wales, Israel was seen as the underdog with only a marginal prospect of survival.

The Children’s Book by AS Byatt
Chatto & Windus, £18.99

The personal and the political are intriguingly – if darkly – brought together in AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book, a family saga that covers the final years of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th. Against the tumultuous changes taking place as a new, more liberal order seeks to replace the established and conventional, we follow the trials and tribulations of families attempting to deal with the newfound freedoms, often at the expense of feeling and emotion.

Ministry of Defeat: The British War in Iraq 2003-2009 by Richard North
Continuum, £19.99

After writing four books with Christopher Booker of the Sunday Telegraph, Dr Richard North, the defence analyst behind the Defence of the Realm blog, has written a blow-by-blow account of Britain’s disastrous occupation of southern Iraq from the invasion in April 2003 to the withdrawal of combat troops earlier this year.

Classic Serial: Ruth
Radio 4

There is much more to Mrs Gaskell than Cranford, thank goodness. Charlotte Brontë loved Mrs Gaskell’s company and conversation. She struck her as “kind, clever, animated and unaffected”. Arthur Hugh Clough, who met her in 1849, somewhat ungallantly said she was “neither young (past 30) nor beautiful” and very retiring, but quite capable of talking “when she likes – a good deal of the clergyman’s wife about her” – a clue taken up by Lord David Cecil who thought her novels were “David Copperfield and Barchester Towers written by a minister’s wife in her drawing room”.

Futurism
Tate Modern, London

A photograph of five smartly dressed if slightly shifty-looking, over-coated men, each one wearing a bowler hat and brightly polished shoes, taken in 1912, gives no indication of their revolutionary zeal or their determination to create a new form of art in both literature and the visual arts that was in keeping with the technological developments of the new century. In the centre of the group, stepping forward slightly, is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: philosopher, poet, self-publicist and the charismatic leader of the Futurists.

Medea
The Scoop at More London

The Steam Industry, under the genial auspices of Phil Wilmott and Joe Fredericks, has a fine tradition of introducing classical drama to youthful audiences at one of London’s more striking outside theatre venues, The Scoop at More London. This summer, they tackle Medea, the most visceral of Greek tragedies, telling the story of the wronged woman who avenges herself on the hero Jason when he takes a new wife to secure his position in a foreign city. The play is beautiful but difficult; unpacking our reactions to revenge and confronting our assumption that the most persuasive speaker is the one to be believed.