Book reviews

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Before the Nakba

When Israel was created in 1948, Zionists set about ethnic cleansing by expelling Palestinians  – the Nakba (‘catastrophe’) – an endeavour on the part of Israel being currently replayed in Gaza and the West Bank.   Sean Sheehan   “The Lord”, a rare fictional account of life in Palestine before […]

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Treasuring trees

There is a type of conifer, the Trojan horse fir, growing on a mountain in the part of western Turkey that meets the Aegean Sea.   Sean Sheehan   It grows above the plain where the city of Troy stood until, as Homer recounts in the “Iliad”, it was finally […]

Book reviews Comments In Focus

Alone but not lonely

Rejections beset the British novelist Barbara Pym but reading two of her later novels confirms a talent that was not appreciated at the time.   Sean Sheehan   Pym wrote six novels in the 1950s and early ‘60s until her publisher unexpectedly rejected her seventh and she consequentially disappeared from […]