MUSTREADS
Out now in paperback
THE CRIME AND THE SILENCE
by Anna Bikont (Windmill Books £9.99)
ON JULY 10 1941, the Jewish population of the small north-eastern Polish town of Jedwabne were rounded up and murdered. Estimates of the number of victims — men, women and children — vary from 340 to 1,600. Some were beaten to death, some shot; the remainder were herded into a barn which was set alight.
The town was occupied by Nazis at the time, and the memorial commemorating the massacre attributed it to the Gestapo.
But in 2001 Jan T. Gross, a Polish-born academic, published Neighbors, a book with a darker theory: that the Jews of Jedwabne were murdered by their Catholic neighbours.
Polish journalist Anna Bikont decided to follow up the story. Her humane, measured and painstakingly researched book establishes the facts beyond all doubt.
Beautifully translated by Alissa Valles, it is a hard-won testament to the importance of historical truth.
THE GREAT BRITISH DREAM FACTORY
by Dominic Sandbrook (Penguin £12.99)
SPORTING successes come and go; the future of the economy is hard to read. But in one area, Britain steadily retains its superpower status: everyone loves our culture.
From Harry Potter to Downton Abbey, Dr Who to David Bowie, British cultural exports have taken over the world. As historian Dominic Sandbrook argues in his richly entertaining account of our national imagination, British culture may not necessarily be the world’s best, but as an export ‘it has a very good claim, pound for pound, to be its most successful’.
Sandbrook’s interest is specifically in popular culture — he gives short shrift to ‘intellectuals’, dismissing the likes of Virginia Woolf, while stoutly defending the oeuvres of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Catherine Cookson.
And he is persuasive, and often very funny, on how the notion of ‘Britishness’ has been framed by our books, our films, our television, music and art.
MAGGIE SMITH: A BIOGRAPHY
by Michael Coveney (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £8.99) DAME Maggie Smith — now 81 — is a national treasure, her unforgettable asperity a delight in every role, from Miss Jean Brodie to Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films and Violet, Countess of Grantham, in Downton Abbey.
Coveney writes that ‘at work, she is obsessive...but like the greatest of vaudevillians, she believes she only properly exists in the spotlight . . . Maggie Smith, even to those who know her best, is not only a mystery, but also an enigma’.
His knowledgeable, elegant biography examines the qualities of the woman in the spotlight (he notes that Ronnie Barker advised young Margaret Smith to give up the stage ‘as I didn’t think she had the talent’).
But he also gently probes Smith’s closely guarded privacy, with revealing anecdotes from friends, fellow thespians and Smith’s sons, the actors Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens.