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Books

‘A dandy aesthete with visions of sacrificial violence’

A review of Patrick Bishop’s The Reckoning. This biography of the Zionist freedom fighter (or terrorist, depending on your view) Avraham Stern is compelling stuff.

29 March 2014

9:00 AM

29 March 2014

9:00 AM

The Reckoning Patrick Bishop

Collins, pp.360, £20, ISBN: 978007506170

Eschewing the biblical advertising of ‘the promised land’ or indeed ‘a land of milk and honey’, the Conservative colonial secretary William Ormsby-Gore presented a far grislier picture of Palestine on the eve of the second world war when he described it as ‘full of arms and bitterness, and there are few who do good and many that do evil’.

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