David Aaronovitch - Times Online - WBLG

The Second Plane by Martin Amis

Kingsley Amis's son has always had plenty of people to hate him. His imagined patrimony, his early success, his implausible virtuosity and his fearlessness have ensured that many who weren't actually offended by him were envious.

It was probably inevitable that Martin Amis would attract the bitter dislike of the more ideologically policed section of the liberal-left intelligentsia. In the past couple of years there has been a slow excommunication from the broad church - with good reviews turned into bad in the London Review of Books - and then last year, the full auto-da-f� - conducted principally in The Guardian, with members of the round-robinocracy, led by Terry Eagleton, waiting their turn to add a faggot to the flames.

Amis's apostasy was not, as it was with others, over the Iraq War. This collection of writings mostly from newspapers on events since September 11, 2001, reminds readers that he always opposed the invasion. In March 2003, he gave warning that the “intellectually null” George Bush, “a tax-cutting dry drunk from West Texas” was leading his country into a disastrous trap, ineluctably provoking, inter alia, “an additional generation of terror from militant Islam”. If Amis is open to any criticism over Iraq, it is that he explores Saddam Hussein's science-fiction bloodiness - as he does in the short story In the Palace of the End - without the slightest realistic notion of how it might be brought to a conclusion.

The proximate cause of Amis's being run out of Lib-town was an interview that he had given to Ginny Dougary of this newspaper. In it he examined his own emotional and political reaction to the London bombings and confessed to a punitive urge - “don't you feel it?” - to somehow force the Muslim community to get its house in order. These were the sentiments described by Eagleton as being appropriate to a “British National Party thug”.

The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor by William Langewiesche

HERE’S ONE TO SPOIL your weekend. Within the next few years some country somewhere is likely to use nuclear weapons against its enemy. This is the conclusion – made without apocalyptic language – reached in William Langewiesche’s long essay on nuclear proliferation.

A spare, almost austere writer – as some of the best American journalists are – Langewiesche can make the complex area of nuclear policy comprehensible to the layest of laypersons, from his description of how 220,000 were killed in the two bomb blasts over Japan in 1945, to his summary of 60 years of big-power attempts at keeping the nuclear club as small as possible.

He has set out to answer two questions: first whether terrorists are likely to get the bomb, and secondly whether countries we don’t like will get the bomb. After he has travelled to Russia and the Middle East, his answer on the first is mildly reassuring, to the second most certainly not. To make a device you need a certain amount of highly enriched uranium, which is hard to steal and very hard to make. Once you have the enrichment for civilian purposes, however, you can then carry straight on and make a bomb. Only international inspection can tell whether or not this is happening.

Pride and privilege (So London)

Cameron: the Rise of the New Conservative by Francis Elliot and James Hanning, Fourth Estate, £18.99

Until page 218 of this book, not only would I not have voted for him, but I would have liked to throttle David Cameron. Inevitably with a man who is so young and who has done relatively little, Cameron is more of an extended profile than a biography. Even so, in its outlines I saw a world that – naively – I thought had died some time ago, a world of titles, silver spoons, old school ties and exclusive dining clubs.

It goes like this. Boy Cameron begins life in a large Queen Anne rectory in Wiltshire, where he experiences an ‘Eden of cricket matches and gambolling’ in the bosom of a family which is described by a friend as ‘very wholesome, but not in a boring way’, thus subverting Tolstoy’s famous maxim about all happy families being alike. He is ‘sweet’, ‘well adjusted’, endearing, courteous, stimulating and – most galling of all – an ‘expert kisser’ at the age of 13.

The envious can only hope he learned his snogging at Heatherdown prep school, where the royal princes also attended, and where the parents’ evenings were like a roll-call from Debrett’s. There he meets the youngest Getty, whose birthday Cameron and several other gilded pubescents celebrate with a trip on Concorde to America, taking in New York, Walt Disney World in Florida, Cape Canaveral, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon and Hollywood. Then it’s Eton, about which I cannot be bothered to write a single word, then Oxford and the Bullingdon Club, where Cameron is never quite in the frame for pot-plant throwing or window-smashing (as Boris Johnson seems to have been) or, indeed, for cocaine-snorting, but where he does study hard and go punting with Jade Jagger.

Troubled waters (So London magazine)

South of the River by Blake Morrison, Chatto and Windus, £17.99

This May, as every sentient adult with a television or radio knows, sees the 10th anniversary of Tony Blair’s first short, sunlit walk down Downing Street. They know this because the anniversary programmes began, as is now the custom, more than two months early. It’s very important to try to get your message in – about how the country has become stressed and over-competitive – before the other guy does.

Ten years ago, we had never heard of iPods, YouTube, broadband or disillusionment. Now, everyone is plugged into a Nano and everyone is disillusioned, including those who claimed most loudly never to have had any illusions.

This fashion has become so ubiquitous that I’d not been looking forward to the inevitable onset of bilious non-fiction accounts of the Blair Years, let alone the ‘satires’ and dramatists’ takes on just how disappointed/betrayed the artist of 2007 feels by the politics of the past decade.

So I made a sort of resolution not to read anything or go to anything that promised to be a reflection on the passing era of Tony Blair.

Not black and white (for So London magazine)

Violation: Justice, Race and Serial Murder in the Deep South by David Rose, Harper Press, £16.99

For eight months, from 16 September 1977, white women in the city of Columbus, Georgia, lived in a state of real and unpleasurable fear. In that time a serial killer, who became known as the Stocking Strangler, entered the homes of his victims – all respectable, all elderly and all white – raped them and then strangled them. It obviously added to the horror of the crimes that all these women were Deep South matrons sans reproche: educators, philanthropists and mothers, most of them connected to some of the top people in the city in some way or another.

Six years later, in May 1984, Carlton Gary, a handsome petty criminal who was as sexually successful with women as he was hopeless at crime, was arrested for the murders. Gary – a black man – was quickly tried and condemned to death. At the time of writing, the 54-year-old Gary is on death row in Georgia where he has been waiting for two decades. British journalist David Rose has made the Carlton Gary case his labour of the last decade, first travelling to Georgia in 1996 to talk to people about the case, and this book, which is written with an admirable lack of bombast, displays an astonishing depth of research.

Boo, Hiss, how wrong can you be?

An UnAmerican Life: The Case of Whittaker Chambers by Sam Tanenhaus

Old Street, £25

What's Left: How Liberals Lost their Way by Nick Cohen

Fourth Estate, £12.99

AS A RED-DIAPER BABY, born in the mid1950s, the great causes in the foreground of my early life were noble – Vietnam, civil rights and antiapartheid. But the bookshelves and yellowing pamphlets in our house were populated by the ghosts of a terrible immediate past – wraiths with strange names, such as the Rosenbergs, Arthur Koestler and Alger Hiss.

Hiss was a handsome, cultured American New Dealer, a former senior figure in the State Department where he helped to set up the UN, who found himself accused in 1948 of having been a prewar Communist agent. His accuser, before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC), was an unlovely man – like Koestler, a “renegade” Communist – called Whittaker Chambers. In early 1950 Chambers’s account of working with Hiss in the Communist underground was accepted by a jury in a perjury trial and Hiss was jailed. Richard Nixon made his name and Senator Joe McCarthy was unleashed upon the nation.

Chambers’s notoriety lived on among Left liberals. When Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York TimesBook Review, began to research the life of Whittaker Chambers, he discovered that the embers were easily aroused to flame. “It is almost impossible,” he writes in his biography, “to convey the robustness of Chambers hatred when I began writing this book . . . 40 years after the Hiss verdict.”

The year that formed us

SUEZ 1956: The Forgotten War
by Barry Turner
Hodder & Stoughton, £20; 544pp

TWELVE DAYS: Revolution 1956
by Victor Sebestyen
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £20; 336pp

SECOND-HAND, I remember the autumn of 1956 well, though I was a toddler at the time. The backwash of the suppressed Hungarian uprising could still be felt in families such as mine a decade and more after it had happened; it was a matter of old comrades who didn’t visit any longer and of friendships killed by ideology. I gather that something similar was experienced by high Tories in the aftermath of Suez. Something changed for ever.

Most people, though, can have only the haziest ideas of how it came about that, in two weeks in October and November of that year, Budapest fell twice to Soviet troops and British, French and Israeli forces attacked the state of Egypt. We are taught of these disasters (if we are taught about them at all) that this was the fortnight in which the Empire finally ended, and that this was the moment when the Soviet experiment, as evangelical example for Westerners, collapsed.

Our country, right and wrong

As Israel’s security has increased, its hold on the world’s affections is slipping

MAN IN THE SHADOWS by Efraim Halevy Weidenfield, £18.99; 304pp CITY OF ORANGES by Adam LeBor Bloomsbury, £18.99; 384pp A STRANGE DEATH by Hillel Halkin Weidenfield, £12.99; 352pp IF THE POPULAR VIEW OF Israel in the 1960s could be distilled into one image, it would probably be the refugee Jews on Leon Uris’s ship, The Exodus, clamouring for their own country. This was the Israel born in adversity out of oppression. If there was a symbol of Israel since, it might be that of the Mossad operative, faithful servant to a powerful state — ruthless and almost invincible. The change might have marked Israel’s increased security (though not, as this week’s suicide bomb in Tel Aviv has shown, the security of its citizens), but it also marks its declining purchase on our affections. It should worry about our affections, many Israelis might think.

Tariq's Odd Assertion

Immersed in Iraq books for the article below, I came across one of those assertions that seems to pepper books by radical resistors. It was in a book of transcribed interviews between Tariq Ali and the Coloradan radio host, David Barsamian. The book is called Speaking of Empire and Resistance and comes warmly recommended by Amy Goodman, The Nation and The New Statesman. On page 130.....

The world according to Wal-Mart

WAL-MART
The Face of Twenty-first Century Capitalism
edited by Nelson Lichtenstein
The New Press, £12.99, 350pp

SWEET AND LOW
by Rich Cohen
Cape, £12.99, 288pp

AFTER MICROSOFT CAME Wal-Mart. Not chronologically, of course, since the Arkansas Waltons started their company round about the time that Bill Gates was riding his first tricycle, but in terms of media and academic attention. Last year a large symposium was held in California to discuss whether Wal-Mart was, as its professorial convenor claimed, the “template for 21st-century capitalism” and — essentially — what to do to stop it. From that symposium now arrives (a year later than in the US) a book of essays.