Critics' bites of the year

● A Jewel in the Crown of 20th-century Israel.
David Herman on The World a Moment Later by Amir Gutfreund (Jan 23)

● A former Yale philosophy professor, Neiman has lately acquired the reputation for making her subject accessible and relevant. To this reviewer, she does little more than package left-wing rhetoric as profundity.
David Conway on Moral Clarity by Susan Neiman (Aug 21)

● In this mordant, merciless portrayal of the contrasting lives of rich and poor Jews, the difference between them is akin to heaven and hell.
Anne Garvey on The Dogs and the Wolves, the last of the reissues of the novels of Irène Némirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith (Oct 23)

● There are extensive passages on (my great-uncle Aubrey/Abba) Eban’s career as Foreign Minister and his pivotal roles in the wars of 1967 and 1973, but Suzy tactfully omits his cheeky use of the Israeli diplomatic bag to bring highly unkosher treats from New York to his family in ration-bound London in the 1940s and ’50s.
Simon Round reveals a family secret in his review of Suzy Eban’s biography of her late husband, A Sense of Purpose (Jan 9)

● Yes, this is a big best-seller dealing with the most serious of subjects, but don’t believe the hype. For all its smart ambitions, this is a nasty, shameful book.
David Herman’s verdict on The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell (Mar 6)

● He [Kissinger] was clearly ambitious. Even as a student he ran an annual meeting of young careerists from all over the world – future presidents, prime ministers, bankers and journalists.
Wilf Altman on The Kissinger Saga by Evi Kurz (May 15)

● Foulds has a tremendous gift for language. Whether his future lies with poetry or the novel is still hard to say but he is already one of the most accomplished writers of the new generation.
From David Herman’s review of Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze (June 19)

● There is plenty and more on the traditional anti-Christian motifs embedded in many Yiddish phrases, enough to make a modern Jewish person (or Yiddish teacher of “multicultural” students) want to tsiter (tremble), khalesh (faint), pretend the book doesn’t exist (nisht geshtoygn, nit gefloygn), or makhn pleyte (run for it) as if from a sreyfe (fire).
Dovid Katz on Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in all its Moods by Michael Wex (Oct 9)

● Why does the author write (other than because he can’t help himself)? Because he wants to stop tomorrow from becoming today, because he wants to pull a few fireflies of memory from the pit of oblivion. Because like a true humanist he wants to enlighten the reader’s darkness.
Clive Sinclair on Rhyming Life and Death by Amos Oz (Feb 6)

● An American officer serving in Russia in 1918 called Trotsky “the greatest Jew since Jesus Christ”. It might be truer to say that he was not the messiah but a very, very naughty boy.
David Cesarani concludes his review of Trotsky: A Biography by Robert Service (Nov 27)

● There is something deeply depressing about the notion, still prevalent in certain quarters, of opera as an exclusive art form, with a deliberate cachet designed to keep the charmed classes in and the oiks out.
Stephen Pollard on Opera for Everybody: The Story of English National Opera by Susie Gilbert and The Gilded Stage: A Social History of Opera by Daniel Snowman (Dec 4)

● Nusseibeh has been the target of accusations and assaults by militant students, and death threats by Hamas. His willingness to engage in negotiations did not convince all Israelis that he was not a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Samir El-Youssef on the plight of the moderate, reviewing Sari Nusseibeh’s Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (Sept 4)

● It’s not Fugitive Pieces, but it’s almost there.
Francesca Segal on The Winter Vault, Anne Michaels’s second novel, arriving 12 years after her prize-laden debut (May 29)

● For these aces, unlike lower beings in trenches, the First World War was closer in spirit to the age of chivalry than to what would eventuate at Hiroshima. When Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, was shot down after 82 kills, his corpse was buried by British authorities with full military honours.
Stoddard Martin on Fighter Heroes of WWI by Joshua Levene (Jun 5)

● This is the best book on the Middle East conflict to appear in years, albeit one deeply disquieting for friends of Israel. It should be compulsory reading for all professing interest or expertise on the subject.
David Conway’s verdict on A State Beyond the Pale by Robin Shepherd (Nov 6)

● Simone Veil is probably best-known in France for having guided into being the 1975 law legalising abortion... 30 years later, this monumental achievement remains controversial in some circles... shamefully, the head of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada, in a letter to the Polish President in 2005 opposing her presence at the 60th anniversary commemorations of the liberation of Auschwitz, said that Veil “was to be held responsible for a mass-murder of human life far exceeding” that of the Nazis.
Natasha Lehrer on A Life by Simone Veil

● Martin Stannard... is never able to convey the exhilaration that many obviously felt in her company, and which all her books exude, the sense that life is a wonderful gift, which we must embrace wholeheartedly, no matter how difficult it is.
Gabriel Josipovici on Martin Stannard’s long-awaited biography of C Muriel Spark (Oct 2)