At 9 p.m. on Tuesday, March 14, 1939, Max Brod and his wife stood at Platform 2 of Prague’s Wilson Station. He carried a bulky leather suitcase stuffed with loose bundles of papers: manuscripts, journals, travel diaries, rough drafts and hundreds of letters, all written by Brod’s closest friend, Franz Kafka, who had died 15 years before.

The Nazis had just marched into Prague and the Brods were fleeing to Palestine on the last train to cross the Czech-Polish border before it was closed. Travelling by train and ship they eventually reached Tel Aviv, where Brod lived until his death in 1968. Kafka’s papers were then passed on to his assistant and close friend, Esther Hoffe, a fellow Czech Jew, and when she died at 101 in 2007, she in turn passed them on to her two daughters, Eva and Ruth (Ruth died of cancer in 2012).

Then a series of trials began which lasted for over a decade from 2007 as Eva and Ruth tried to defend their claim to the Kafka and Brod papers against the National Library of Israel, on the one hand, and the German Literature Archive at Marbach in Germany, on the other. Benjamin Balint’s fascinating book, Kafka’s Last Trial, tells the story of these trials but also explores the larger issues at stake: who owns Kafka?

Did Esther Hoffe’s daughters have a legitimate claim? Their mother had inherited the papers from Max Brod who had brought them from Prague. But would they be able to look after the papers properly or would they be at risk in Eva Hoffe’s cat-infested apartment and could the sisters be trusted to provide full access to researchers and academics? A number of key figures, including Reiner Stach, author of the definitive three-volume biography of Kafka, thought not.

Worse still, might they sell off these precious manuscripts at the first opportunity, possibly to private buyers? In 1988 Esther Hoffe put the original 1914 manuscript of The Trial up for auction at Sotheby’s and it was sold for £1 million. The previous year, Kafka’s 500 letters to Felice Bauer (1912-17) were sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $605,000.

There were other issues than whether the Hoffe sisters should be allowed to keep the Kafka papers. The National Library of Israel claimed that because Kafka was one of the greatest Jewish writers of the 20th century, these papers belonged in Israel. Kafka’s three sisters had been killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust and had Kafka not already died in 1924, he would surely have been murdered too. Brod was fortunate to escape from Nazi-occupied Prague as a refugee. More to the point, he was a passionate Zionist who had spent almost 30 years of his life in Palestine, later Israel.

Eva Hoffe, however, argued that there was no reason why Kafka’s papers should go to an Israeli state library. As she pointed out, “Natan Alterman’s archives are in London and Yehuda Amichai’s are in New Haven”, referring to two of Israel’s most beloved poets, just as countless British writers including Kingsley Amis and Tom Stoppard have sold their archives to American libraries.

If the Israeli claim was based on Kafka’s Jewishness, how Jewish was Kafka? He never set foot in Palestine. He spoke of going to Palestine but loved it at a distance. As Balint observes astutely, “Marriage and the Promised Land: two forms of happiness deferred, yearned for but not possessed.” Kafka attended the 11th World Zionist Congress in Vienna in 1913 but wrote to Brod, “I sat in the Zionist congress as if it were an event totally alien to me.” He studied Hebrew but wrote, “What is Hebrew but news from far away?” And even if his Jewishness was important to him, does that give Israel the right to claim ownership of the papers of a writer who spent his entire life in the diaspora?

The German Literature Archive is the world’s largest archive of modern German literature. It claimed that although Kafka was a Czech Jew, he was also the greatest modern writer in German. Hannah Arendt wrote that Kafka’s work “speaks the purest German prose of the century.” George Steiner praised “the translucency of Kafka’s German, its stainless quiet”. In addition, the archive in Marbach already owned the second largest collection of Kafka manuscripts in the world, including The Trial. Crucially, Marbach did not claim legal ownership of the manuscripts; it simply wished to be granted the right to bid for them.

There were other arguments for placing Kafka’s papers in a German archive. Supporters of Marbach, like the Kafka biographer Reiner Stach, argued that in Israel, “there is neither a complete edition of Kafka’s works, nor a single street named after him. And if you wish to look for Brod in Hebrew, you have to go to a second-hand bookshop.”

As if this wasn’t already complicated enough, it is not clear that Brod had a legitimate claim to these papers in the first place. Kafka had famously instructed his friend to burn his remaining manuscripts, diaries and letters unread, and Brod disobeyed him. Secondly, Kafka has a living heir, Michael Steiner, who lives in London and arguably has a greater claim.

This wasn’t just a legal battle between different claimants. Over all of the legal proceedings hung the shadow of the Holocaust, of German guilt and Jewish suffering. How could a German archive claim the ownership of the original manuscripts of a Jewish writer when Germans had murdered his sisters and many of his closest circle and would surely have murdered him?

This is a minefield and Balint handles these complicated claims and counter-claims with great care. He has read widely in the literature about Kafka and provides a fascinating account of the Jewish world of early 20th century Prague, which formed Kafka and Brod and their interests in Zionism and Yiddish culture, especially Yiddish theatre.

Above all, he brings Brod to life. Today, Brod is largely known, especially in the English-speaking world, as the man who championed Kafka and preserved his reputation after his death. In 1913, Brod published Kafka’s breakthrough story, The Judgment. “I wrested from Kafka nearly everything he published either by persuasion or by guile,” he later recalled.

But Brod was a prolific poet, novelist and critic in his own right. He published almost 90 titles. His best-known novel was published in 1916 in a printing of 100,000 copies. By his mid-twenties, writes Balint, “Brod was corresponding with Hermann Hesse, Hugo von Hofmannstahl, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke and other leading literary lights.” In 1912 Brod and Einstein played a violin sonata together. He and Kafka visited brothels in Prague, Milan, Leipzig and Paris. Like Kafka, Brod was a “Zwischenmensch”, betwixt-and-between German, Czech and Jewish cultures.

Balint is an extremely interesting writer and critic. He has written a book on the American magazine Commentary, and has co-written Jerusalem: City of the Book (due out in 2019). Recently he wrote a superb review article about yet another Zwischenmensch,  Gershom Scholem. Based in Jerusalem, he is familiar with Israeli culture and politics. He has interviewed all the key players, has no axe to grind (unlike the anti-Zionist academic Judith Butler, who wrote a long, tendentious essay on this story in 2011) and is remarkably even-handed throughout.

He moves effortlessly between the three main trials, ending at the Israel Supreme Court, and the lives of Kafka, Brod, Esther Hoffe and her daughters. If you don’t know the final verdict, I won’t spoil it for you here. The book is a fascinating page-turner. It is also cultural history at its best.

Balint gives the final word to Kafka. In 1916, Kafka wrote in a letter to his fiancée Felice Bauer, “Won’t you tell me what I really am? In the last Neue Rundschau the writer says: ‘There is something fundamentally German about K’s narrative art.’ In Max’s article on the other hand: ‘K’s stories are among the most typically Jewish documents of our time’.”

Kafka concludes: “A difficult case. Am I a circus rider on two horses? Alas, I am no rider, but lie prostrate on the ground.” 

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This has been an extraordinary autumn for books about the havoc bad fathers wreak on their children. It is hard to know which father comes out worst: Saul Bellow in Zachary Leader’s excellent biography, Jonathan Miller in William Miller’s dark book about his childhood, or Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, in his daughter’s memoir, Small Fry.

What is perhaps most interesting is how many ways men find to be bad fathers — critical, neglectful, in some cases, just plain mean. “When with his sons,” writes Leader, “he [Bellow] did not hide his anger or irritation.” When one of his sons phoned to congratulate him on winning the Nobel Prize, Bellow simply said, “Now you know why I was after you to be quiet 30 years ago.” The backlash was inevitable. Already, when he was 16, Bellow’s eldest son, Gregory, wrote his father a “scathing letter” accusing him of not keeping up with his alimony payments. Fifty years later, in his memoir, Gregory wrote how his father’s reply was typical, “subscribing to his self-justification that his career as an artist enabled him to let people down with impunity”. Another son, Daniel, wrote to his father, “I’ve been a better son to you than you deserve.” Leader tries not to take sides but by the end the stage is like King Lear, with corpses everywhere.

Jonathan Miller comes across as a very different kind of father. Like Bellow he is very talented: a brilliant comedy performer, television presenter and raconteur, one of the most acclaimed theatre, opera and television directors of his time, and a fascinating intellectual, fluent on subjects from the madness of George III to early 20th-century neurology.

Yet the picture that emerges in his son’s memoir, Gloucester Crescent: Me, My Dad and Other Grown-Ups, is desperately sad. Early on William, Jonathan’s middle son, writes, “Much of the time he’s far too busy with work and his big ideas to think about family life and leaves Mum to deal with all that.” Lots of the famous fathers on the Camden Town street are like this, William writes. An American friend of his parents says, “The dads live on Planet-Do-I-Give-A-Shit.” They engage in what William calls “competitive typing”, sitting at desks looking out over the gardens of Gloucester Crescent, as the plays, books and reviews pour forth. Others are slow, hesitant. “Mum says these are the ‘tortured ones’, which I was a bit worried about because I think Dad might be one of those.”

William soon learns that his father is tormented by insecurity and depression. “I’ve heard him tell Mum that, whenever he can’t think of anything to write and hates the work he’s doing, he says the best way out of it would be to kill himself.” He describes his father’s attempt to write a book on Marshall McLuhan: “He would come down to the kitchen and read what he’d written to Mum, then walk off screwing the bits of paper up and throwing them on the floor, saying, ‘It’s all hopeless’.”

There’s another side to these dark moods: Miller the performer who needs to be at the centre of everyone’s attention. “What he really wants,” writes William, “is a family who, if they can’t talk about something intelligent, sit in silence and let him do the talking so he can lecture about Charles Darwin.” The best story in the book describes a visit by Miller’s schoolfriend, Oliver Sacks, who, like Miller, had a stammer. “If Oliver is trying to make a point and gets stuck on a word, Dad goes straight in there and talks over him with his own theory. I once saw Oliver get so frustrated with this sort of situation that he twisted one of Mum’s silver spoons under the table as he stuttered until it looked like a corkscrew.”

His famous father is often critical. William doesn’t read enough and when he does find a book he likes, his father tells him he should be reading something better. He tries hard to please his father, taking science A Levels when he has no aptitude for science at all. It doesn’t end well. Even now, in his fifties, he knows his book won’t be good enough for his father. He recently told an interviewer that he thought his father would never read it. I feel sure he’s right.

One feels some sympathy for Jonathan Miller. It is hard to feel any for Steve Jobs in his daughter’s memoir, Small Fry. He and her mother were high school sweethearts. She became pregnant and had the child. “My father,” writes Lisa Brennan-Jobs, “didn’t visit or help with child support.” This was early on in his  career. More extraordinary are the stories of his meanness when he becomes the CEO of Apple. There are jaw-dropping moments when, having fallen out with his daughter, he won’t help out with her payments at Harvard and she is rescued by their next-door neighbours.

Much worse than the stinginess are the stories of his casual cruelty, humiliating waitresses, his daughter’s friends and worst of all, Lisa herself. “‘What’s wrong with you?’” he asks Lisa’s cousin. “What was wrong with her? Why did she miss social cues? ‘You can’t even talk,’ he said. ‘You can’t even eat. You’re eating shit.’” Who demolishes a young person like this?

Lisa asks if his early computer was named after her. He must have known how much this would mean to a young schoolgirl. “‘Nope.’ His voice was clipped, dismissive.” Nothing she does at school is good enough. When she wins a prize at the school debating club he says, “Better to debate in real life. The club’s kind of lame.’”

The stories these children tell are desperately sad. It is hard to imagine how they emerged from their fathers’ shadows.

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When Frederic Raphael applied to Cambridge, he wrote at the top of the first page of his essay, “Art is one of the four things that unite men.” (Turgenev). Years later he said, “I didn’t know anything about Turgenev. I didn’t know what the other three things that united men were. One of them, you can depend on it, is anti-Semitism.”

This is pure Raphael. Smart, funny and absolutely honest about anti-Semitism. You can almost hear the lines being spoken by Tom Conti as Adam Morris in The Glittering Prizes, the 1976 BBC drama that made Raphael a household name.

Against the Stream, the latest volume of Raphael’s series of diaries, Personal Terms, begins in 1981, just a few years after The Glittering Prizes. Raphael is at his height. He had written several very successful screenplays, numerous TV dramas and almost 20 novels. He had a place in the Dordogne, another on a Greek island and a home in South Kensington. The 1960s and ’70s had been kind to Raphael.

Some years later, a critic asked, “Does anybody talk these days with the nervy brilliance and bite of the characters in a Frederic Raphael novel?” The obvious answer is yes, Frederic Raphael does. Against the Stream is full of those clever lines. “Her benevolence is without remorse,” he writes of Shirley Williams. “Deprived of the ‘Y’ in my typewriter,” he writes, “I am like a runner with a small, sharp pebble in his shoe.” “Success,” he writes, “leads some people to put on weight; [Michael] Frayn has put on height.”

It is a book full of bite and feline gossip. Someone tells him they have got Arnold Wesker to write the script for a movie. “‘Well,’ I said, ‘all you need now is someone to do the rewrites’.” Anthony Burgess “treats homosexuality with a coarseness that makes cardboard out of flesh.”

There are some people who clearly fascinate Raphael. He writes with real insight about George Steiner, who, he writes, “never fails to carry his puncture kit; most people’s are to repair punctures, his vocation is to deliver them.” But there’s real admiration for Steiner — for his erudition, of course, but there’s a kind of affection too. One reason, surely, is that Steiner, like Raphael, was one of those Jews who wasn’t afraid to talk honestly about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust at a time when hardly  anyone in Britain did. “I’m actually an extremely timid person,” he once said. “But to be a Jew in the 20th century means knowing that the opposite of cowardice is not courage. It’s doing what you have to do.”

The Glittering Prizes was one of the first major TV drama series to talk about anti-Semitism, not just in the Oswald Mosley figure played superbly by Eric Porter, but in the whole atmosphere of 1950s Cambridge which the first episode so brilliantly evoked.

Against the Stream nags away at the question of anti-Semitism. Sartre, he writes, had bravely taken on the subject, but “in 1940, he had gained academic preferment after his path was racially cleansed by the removal of Jewish profs.” Several times he refers to the attempt by Cambridge philosophers to Christianise their master, Wittgenstein. He appears on a BBC radio discussion with a former Cambridge teacher. “He made bold to say that I had shown little of the aggression of my undergraduate self. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘I didn’t mention the Jews within the first five minutes of the programme’.”

This exchange raises an interesting question about awkward Jews: Raphael, George Steiner, Jonathan Miller, Arnold Wesker. They all have a reputation for being difficult. Are they difficult because they have spent years speaking out about anti-Semitism? Or is speaking out what defines them as difficult?

People often say Raphael (and his characters) are too clever for their own good. The references to Sartre and Wittgenstein are sharp and witty. We could do with that intelligence and wit today as we try to weather the Corbyn storm.

The Glittering Prizes ends with a remarkable passage from Adam Morris’s new book: “They asked him how he had managed for so long to lead a double life. He replied that nothing could be easier. As long as he could keep just one chamber of his castle locked and its contents safe from scrutiny.”

Against the Stream offers many insights into Raphael’s “double life”. An American who made his career in Britain. A Jew who went to Charterhouse and Cambridge. A Hollywood script-doctor who reads Ancient Greek for fun. Vain, sharp-tongued, but the sort of truth-teller Britain needed then and needs now. 

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She was right: I hadn’t. Lorna Wing had only just published the journal article which introduced the term, “Asperger’s Syndrome”.  That year (1981), one in 2,500 children in America were classified with autism spectrum disorders, including Asperger’s. By 2016 this had risen more than 35-fold to one in 68.

At the same time, a wave of books appeared about Nazi doctors and psychiatrists, including Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors (1986), Benno Müller-Hill’s Murderous Science (translated 1988), Robert Proctor’s Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (1988) and Michael Kater’s Doctors Under Hitler (1990). Martin Amis acknowledged the importance of Lifton’s book for his novel about a Nazi doctor, Time’s Arrow (1991). 

Asperger’s Children explores the career of the man behind Asperger’s Syndrome. Who was Hans Asperger, now regarded as one of the most famous psychiatrists of his time? Was he a benevolent and humane doctor? Or was he deeply implicated in Nazi psychiatry and its darkest episode, euthanasia?

This is Sheffer’s central charge. During the Second World War, the Nazis killed between 5,000 and 10,000 children as “unfit”. This led to an even more murderous adult euthanasia programme. As Sheffer writes, these adult killings “soon moved to mass selections and wholesale deportations from asylums and hospitals to six major killing centers in the Reich”. The second-largest killing centre in the Reich was Spiegelgrund in Vienna and one of the key psychiatrists there during the early years of the war, deciding who should live and who should die, was Hans Asperger. 

Asperger’s Children is not a biography. Sheffer uses Asperger’s career and work as a way of looking at the history of Nazi psychiatry in the Reich. His ideas were radicalised by the rise of what Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann called “the racial state”, the biologising of categories of belonging and non-belonging. Autism was at the heart of this and Asperger was a rising star in the debates about autism. 

It is a complicated story. First, as Sheffer points out, “Asperger is often depicted as compassionate and progressive.” He was a practising Catholic and never joined the Nazi Party. However, the archives tell another story. “Files reveal,” she writes, “that Asperger participated in Vienna’s child killing system on multiple levels. He was close colleagues with leaders in Vienna’s child euthanasia system and, through his numerous positions in the Nazi state, sent dozens of children to Spiegelgrund children’s institution, where children in Vienna were killed.”

Born in 1906, Asperger was brought up in a small village in rural Austria. He grew up in a devout Catholic family, who had been farmers for generations. This is important for several reasons. Catholics were later passionately opposed to Nazi euthanasia. At the same time, Austria was a hotbed of Nazism: 14 per cent of the SS membership and 40 per cent of personnel in extermination programmes were Austrians.
Asperger studied medicine at the University of Vienna and like contemporaries such as Eichmann and Heydrich he was in his mid-twenties when Hitler came to power. He did not join the Nazi Party, which proved crucial in clearing his reputation after the war, but he joined the Fatherland Front and supported the new Austrofascist regime in the mid-1930s. The Vienna medical school removed three-quarters of its personnel, most of them Jews, and as they escaped into exile, Asperger rose through the ranks.

Vienna had been a centre of research into what Leo Kanner later called autism. But what interests Sheffer, in particular, is how earlier debates about eugenics and autism changed dramatically as the Nazi regime took over psychiatry and medicine. They produced a mix of moralising judgments and biological assumptions about the “unfit”. Above all, they were preoccupied with the idea of a Volksgemeinschaft, a unified, homogenous national community, and the crucial distinction became between those children who fitted in and those who did not or could not. This is why autism became so important. Nazi psychiatrists like Asperger became interested in anti-social children, those who did not have social feeling. Asperger wrote about one boy, Harro, that he resisted the “important social habits of daily life”. In some cases, such children could be teachable, they could learn to become sociable. But many could not. And as the Nazi regime moved towards euthanasia this became a death sentence for them.

Sheffer follows Asperger’s career from 1930s Vienna to the war years and beyond. She looks at how his ideas changed to fit in with Nazi psychiatry and shows how he became involved in a group of leading Nazi psychiatrists whom he met at conferences and worked with in Vienna. There are, however, worrying gaps in her account. The period 1925-31 passes unnoticed. There is little about his war service in Croatia, 1944-45. There are troubling questions. Why didn’t Asperger join the Nazi Party? How did he reconcile his Catholicism with the Nazi euthanasia programme? How original were the debates about autism in interwar Vienna compared to contemporary debates in Britain, France and the US? Sheffer has done a considerable amount of research and yet much of her language is speculative (“It may well have been”, “It appears that”, “Whether or not he intended it”). This can feel slippery and uncertain. There is also too much guilt by association. Many of Asperger’s colleagues did terrible things. Did he? How does Asperger compare with them? Sometimes we run out of evidence. There is a chapter on Asperger’s patients but Sheffer only writes about four main case histories. How representative are they?

There is one particularly unsettling question. Sheffer is keen to put Asperger’s ideas about autism in the context of changing Nazi ideas. But I keep thinking about that boy in the ice-cream shop 35 years ago, and Asperger’s accounts describe him very well. Too often, Sheffer is a voice for the prosecution. But her book doesn’t help us understand why his ideas seemed so relevant in late-20th-century Britain and America, half a century after the war. If his writings on autism were a response to Nazi ideas, why did they speak to parents and psychiatrists in liberal societies decades later? Sheffer is very good at looking at Asperger in context, but perhaps she loses sight of his originality along the way.

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Ken Loach has directed almost 30 TV dramas and 26 films over the past 50 years, most notably Cathy Come Home and Kes in the 1960s and, more recently, I, Daniel Blake. He has been hailed as one of Britain’s leading postwar directors and received numerous awards: the Cannes Special Jury Prize (twice), the Palme d’Or at Cannes (twice) and the Honorary Golden Bear at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival. His films are often moving accounts of homelessness, mental illness and poverty in contemporary Britain. They usually depict the clash between ordinary people facing terrible problems and uncaring authorities, whether housing officers, school teachers or social security officials. Their indifference is contrasted with the humanity of Loach’s working men and women, battling with poverty and terrible working conditions. He has also made films about left-wing causes abroad: the violence of the Contras in Nicaragua (Carla’s Song) and the Spanish Civil War (Land and Freedom).

Loach has never pretended to be even-handed. He has always been a passionate political activist. In 1985 he made a documentary about the poetry and music that emerged from the miners’ strike, Which Side Are You On? There has never been any doubt which side Loach has been on, at home or abroad.

All this is fine, in many ways admirable. There is no denying Loach’s achievements, his productivity or his burning sense of social justice. However, there are serious problems with his work, his politics and his reputation. His use of documentary material in drama-documentaries prompted Grace Wyndham Goldie to accuse him in the 1960s of sidestepping the BBC’s rules about political partisanship. In the 1980s his documentary A Question of Leadership, attacking the trade union leadership for allegedly betraying the rank and file, was criticised by the Independent Broadcasting Authority for its anti-government stance.

His film about Ireland, The Wind That Shakes the Barley,  championed the IRA. A friend of the hero, Damien, is executed by the British Black and Tans, and his girlfriend’s farmhouse is burnt to the ground. The film ends with Damien being shot by a firing squad. Should a British filmmaker offer a more complex or even-handed treatment of Ireland? Not Loach.

It was this issue of even-handedness that led to another controversy over Which Side Are You On?, originally commissioned by Melvyn Bragg, himself a lifelong Labour supporter, for The South Bank Show. LWT cancelled it because the programme Loach delivered was considered too politically partisan for an arts programme.

More troubling is the story of the play Perdition. Written by his long-time collaborator, Jim Allen (Loach calls him “a wonderful socialist”), the play was to be directed at the Royal Court by Loach but was cancelled because of accusations of bias and anti-Semitism. It was based on a libel action concerning the alleged collaboration between the wartime Zionist leadership in Hungary and the Nazis. Loach passionately defended the play and later wrote to the Guardian that “the charge of anti-Semitism” against Allen’s play was “the time-honoured way to deflect anti-Zionist arguments”. 

Loach has been an obsessive critic of Israel and has called for an “absolute boycott of all the cultural happenings supported by the Israeli state”. He told an interviewer last year: “Israel is breaking international law, the Geneva Conventions, stealing land that belongs to another people and making the lives of the Palestinians intolerable.”

A passionate supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, he has been accused of being evasive about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. The Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland quoted Loach as saying, “It’s funny these stories suddenly appeared when Jeremy Corbyn became leader, isn’t it?” Writing on the Jewish Voice for Labour website, Loach called this “cynical journalism”. A year later, his response looks even worse.   

And yet despite all this, the more left-wing and partisan his films are, the more prizes he wins.  This tells us more about those who give out European film awards than it does about the quality of Loach’s work. It is simply inconceivable that a conservative film-maker would have received the same kind of acclaim. Loach has supported the poor and the oppressed, but these were always fashionable causes in British television in the 1960s and ‘70s and have become increasingly popular among European film juries.

The telling gap, though, is between the numbers who go to see Loach’s films and the number of prizes he wins. The Wind That Shakes the Barley, his biggest box office success to date, grossed barely £5 million in the UK, I, Daniel Blake little more than £3 million. In the US the figures are even worse. This tells a larger story about left-wing cultural figures. They are hugely popular among critics and prize juries, less so among viewers. Perhaps we should ask the heretical question: does the public rate Ken Loach more accurately than critics and prize juries?

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There is much to enjoy and admire in BBC2’s series, Civilisations. It looks beautiful, from Simon Percy’s opening titles to the directing and photography. The programmes capture the gorgeous colours of art, from Titian and El Greco to 19th-century Japanese woodcuts, from Islamic art to Matisse. Some of these sequences are breathtaking, bringing the great art, sculpture and architecture of different civilisations to life.

There is also the geographic and historical range, from ancient cave paintings, 40,000 years old, to 21st-century artists. At their best, these programmes show us how civilisations have connected and influenced each other: the influence of 19th-century Japanese art on the Impressionists, of Islamic art on Matisse during his time in Tangier, of African art on Picasso. Perhaps best of all is the enthusiasm of the three presenters and the quality of some of the individual readings. For almost three minutes Simon Schama speaks with terrific passion about Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhône, looking at land, water and sky “all melting and dissolving together”. David Olusoga shows how a seemingly interior, domestic space in a painting by Vermeer is full of objects from all over the world.

Finally, there is the politics and history. Olusoga describes the catastrophic encounters between Western conquerors and natives from the Americas to Tahiti. One of the highlights of the series comes when Mary Beard describes how “a distorting and sometimes divisive lens” has deeply affected “the way people in the West have encountered and judged the art of very different civilisations.”

If all this is so good, then why is Civilisations such a mess? Why has it received so much critical flak?

There are always two questions which dominate every major TV historical series. First, where to start? Second, how to slice the cake? When Kenneth Clark set out to present Civilisation, he wrote down 15 subjects (later reduced to 13) on one page of a red notebook. This became the outline of the series. When Jeremy Isaacs produced The World at War, a television history of the Second World War, in 26 episodes, he met the Director of the Imperial War Museum, Noble Frankland, and asked him to write down 14 military topics that any series on the war could not ignore. Isaacs later claimed that this was written down “on the back of an envelope”.

In both cases, Clark and Isaacs knew where they wanted to start and the story they wanted to tell. Crucially, they both wanted to tell a chronological story, moving forward through time. Jacob Bronowski and his producers did the same with The Ascent of Man, telling the story from the evolution of man from apes to modern physics and genetics in 13 one-hour episodes.

San rock paintings (6000 BCE-1900 BC), South Africa (©BBC/NUTOPIA)

What is striking about these series, broadcast in the 1970s, is their confidence and ambition — big historical stories told in multi-part series, either 13 or 26 episodes, unfolding in chronological order. This was not unique to television. Think of major 20th-century books on the history of culture: Van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, Auerbach’s Mimesis, Gombrich’s The Story of Art and his Little History of the World. They all start in the distant past and move forwards to the present.

There was an obvious problem with these books and TV series. They were all written or presented by white European men and they largely told a Eurocentric story. They were too white, too male and too Eurocentric. They didn’t have much time for other cultures or for women (though The World at War obviously gave due prominence to the campaigns in North Africa and the Pacific). Civilisation, in particular, has come in for growing criticism for these omissions since it was first shown.

When the BBC came to produce a new version of Civilisation the first decision was to change the title, emphasise diversity and  choose three presenters, one white man, one black man, and one woman. Civilisations would be as much about Islamic, Indian and Chinese art as it would be about European art. So far, so good.

But how to slice the cake? They obviously couldn’t produce one episode on Islamic art, one on Indian art, and so on. And what about chronology? How could they connect developments happening in different places at the same time?

Civilisations tried to solve these problems with a set of different essays which more or less move forward through time. The problem, though, is the lack of a clear narrative. In episode 2 Mary Beard looks at the human figure from Olmec statues, 3,000 years ago, to Egyptian figures in the Nile Valley, to Greece, Roman Egypt and the Chinese terracotta army, before returning via Greek sculpture to the Olmec statues. What do these have in common apart from the fact that they are all ancient civilisations, albeit thousands of miles and thousands of years apart? What do the Chinese terracotta soldiers have in common with the great Egyptian statues of the Nile Valley? What is interesting about the differences between them? Beautifully filmed, the programme just feels like one thing after another, a sort of crazy Swan Hellenic Cruise, five civilisations in 60 minutes.

It doesn’t help that the analysis is curiously old-fashioned. There is a dig at the pernicious legacy of Winckelmann’s idealisation of Greek civilisation, “a narrow way of seeing” (see this issue’s Underrated on Winckelmann) but otherwise much of this could have come from Clark’s series almost 50 years ago. Beard is a feminist, but perhaps the most powerful sequences in the programme are about male figures: Rameses II, a brutalised and scarred Greek boxer from 300 BC, and The Dying Gaul. The critique of Winckelmann, with two very short clips of Clark on the Apollo Belvedere, is over in a few moments. It raises an important question but it doesn’t make for a sustained critical engagement and is the only time Civilisations explicitly refers to Clark’s series.

“Boxer at Rest” (c. 323-31 BC), Hellenistic artist unknown: Much of “Civilisations” could have come from Kenneth Clark’s original series (© BBC/Nutopia)

Again and again, individual programmes hop from one sequence to another without rhyme or reason. The BBC’s own Arts Editor, Will Gompertz was damning, saying it was “more confused than a drunk driver negotiating Spaghetti Junction at rush hour”. In Schama’s programme about landscape he is at his eloquent best on Dürer, Brueghel and 17th-century Dutch art. Then, inexplicably, the programme moves to the 19th- and 20th-century American West. Why? Presumably to please PBS, the BBC’s American co-producers. In his next programme (episode 5), Schama starts with two extraordinary religious buildings in Constantinople and Rome, but never produces a sustained exploration of the connections and differences between West and East in the 16th century. Then we’re off again, from Cellini’s Perseus to Caravaggio, Velazquez, Rembrandt’s Night Watch and Indian Mughal art. It is not at all clear what the connections are, if any, between these great Western works and Islamic architecture or Mughal art. The giveaway line is when Schama comes to the Taj Mahal, and says in a rather resigned way, “another extraordinary dome”. Indeed. Most of the individual readings are bravura performances, Schama at his best. But you could edit out everything about Islam and India and you would have a perfectly conventional programme about Renaissance and early modern Western European art.

There is another problem. Of course, all these civilisations have great works of art, and most have works depicting faith, landscapes and the human figure. The question is, what’s new here? Mary Beard talking about “bling” or Schama saying about a Minoan object, “It’s 3D folks! It’s coming at you!” doesn’t alter the fact that there’s very little that’s original as history or art history. At times it’s terribly predictable. No sooner has David Olusoga mentioned the Industrial Revolution than up pops Joseph Wright of Derby’s Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. When he’s talking about the impact of African art on 20th-century Modernism, we cut to Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon.

It’s not new as television either. Here is our old friend the single presenter, turning up in exotic locations all over the world, with a lush soundtrack, beautifully filmed paintings and objects and the occasional piece of archive film. It is as if John Berger and Mike Dibb’s Ways of Seeing had never happened. Ratings have plummeted. Episode 1 was only seen by 1.9 million. By Episode 3 it was less than half, under a million.    

Civilisations is an implicit criticism of Kenneth Clark’s famous series. Where his series was Eurocentric, this would cast its net wider. Where he was too male-centric, this would have a woman presenter and include more women (though not that many). However, this criticism of Clark misses the point in several crucial respects. Civilisation may have been Eurocentric but Clark wasn’t. He travelled widely and in his autobiography makes clear that he greatly admired other civilisations, especially India and Japan. He describes his first encounter with Japanese art: “I was not only struck dumb with delight, I felt that I had entered a new world.” His enjoyment of art, he wrote, “covers a very wide field — Egyptian, Byzantine, Indian, Chinese, Japanese”. He later presented a three-part TV series on Japanese art and his last TV programme was on early Egypt.

“Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings” (c. 1615-1618), by Bichitr: Connections between Mughal and Western art are not made clear (© BBC/Nutopia)

He didn’t focus on these in Civilisation not because he didn’t care about other cultures, but because his expertise lay in European art. Civilisations gets particularly wobbly when its presenters move out of their comfort zone. Mary Beard is a leading classicist but her views of Chinese terracotta sculptures or Olmec sculptures are not illuminating. Simon Schama has written superb books on 17th-century Dutch culture but how much does he really know about early Chinese landscape painting? Perhaps Clark had a point.

Critics have also attacked Clark for his confident Eurocentrism. But what is striking about the first and last episodes of Civilisation is their moving emphasis on the fragility of European civilisation. He was not some strident cheerleader for the West. Clark knew how close European civilisation came to catastrophe after the fall of Rome. He says of Rome, “That world must have seemed indestructible. However complex and solid it seems [my emphasis], it is actually quite fragile.” Is he talking about Rome or about the Edwardian world of his childhood, about the Thirties or the late Sixties? In his own lifetime, the West had almost collapsed. His own art collection included superb paintings of bombed British cities. The final sequence of Civilisation shows Clark closing his copy of W.B. Yeats, walking into his library at Saltwood Castle, replacing the book on one of several towering bookcases and walking towards the camera, pausing only to lovingly caress a sculpture by Henry Moore. Moore but also Yeats. The greatness of modern art but also “the best lack all conviction”. We should not mistake erudition for boastful confidence.

Watching Civilisations, one might ask whether we have lost confidence in a unifying story about human civilisation and, in particular, in the enormous historical and artistic contributions of the West. Neither Clark nor Bronowski, men who lived through the Second World War, ignored the stories of Western science and     ideas of liberty. For them these advances were central to the story of Western civilisation. But they never thought that was the whole story. Perhaps the most unforgettable scene in The Ascent of Man shows Bronowski, a Polish Jew, at Auschwitz, speaking of how “science stands on the edge of error” and of the dangers of dogma.

Olmec jade figurines (c. 600-200 BC) from Mexico (©BBC/NUTOPIA)

Civilisations, by contrast, has a far narrower sense of civilisation than Clark or Bronowski. There is little about science and technology, nothing about ideas of liberty and tolerance. Too often Civilisations is about the costs of Western progress, not about its achievements. 19th-century urbanisation, David Olusoga tells us, was “a social disaster”. The parks, libraries and galleries of 19th-century Europe count for nothing. Later he has a dig about “the supposed triumph of European rationalism” and “the stifling conventions of bourgeois society”. The only time the word “bourgeois” is used is in a sneer.

Clark hardly needed to be lectured about the problems of Western civilisation. His series was about the tension between fragility and achievement. But at least he thought he had a story to tell. So did Bronowski. Civilisations has none of this confidence. It has lost faith in the old story and doesn’t have anything to replace it with. Recycled versions of John Berger and Edward Said are not the same thing. Too often, what we get are the fashionable pieties of our time. It is, ultimately, a monument to what may prove a brief moment in Anglo-American political correctness.

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Since then Mazower has written two big, ambitious books: Salonica, City of Ghosts (2004), an account of how Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together for 500 years, and Hitler’s Empire (2008), dark and original.

At first, Mazower’s new book could not be more different. It is a family memoir and starts with his father, William, at the end of his life. Born in north London, he spent his life in the suburban tranquillity of Highgate and Golders Green. He studied at Balliol, had a quiet war and spent 30 years working in middle management for Lever Brothers. His life seems a world away from the terrors of 20th-century Europe that Mazower has addressed throughout his career. As a schoolboy he swapped comics, collected stamps and kept up with the cricket scores. As an adult, family life in Golders Green seems contented, secure, very English.

But as Mazower explores the story of his father’s family, a very different picture emerges. We move from blazers and rockeries to Big History: the Russian Revolution, Stalin’s Terror and the Holocaust. Above all, it becomes the story of William’s parents, Frouma and Max Mazower, and we remember they are among the people Dark Continent was dedicated to. For good reason.

Max (born Mordecai) Mazower was a Jewish Bundist from the Russian Pale of Settlement. For years he lived a double life, helping to run an underground socialist movement in Vilna, “the revolutionary hub for north-western Russia”, while simultaneously working as a respectable accountant. He was arrested several times by the Tsarist police but escaped and moved in revolutionary circles in pre-war central Europe. These years taught him everything he needed to know about the Bolsheviks.

In 1909 Max got a job selling typewriters in Russia for a British company. Mazower sums up his grandfather’s life at this point: “Since 1901 he had been sent twice to Siberia, escaping both times; he had lived an exile’s life in Switzerland and Germany; and he had directed Bund operations in Vilna, Warsaw, and Łódź.” This was nothing compared to what was to come. Max went on to sell typewriters during the Russian Revolution and Civil War, constantly on the move. In 1923 he escaped to London and never returned to Russia. He married, settled in Highgate and learned to speak English with a perfect accent.

He also became a man of secrets. He apparently never told his wife the name of his own mother. He never spoke about his revolutionary past. “Many of his closest comrades ended up in violent deaths,” Mazower writes, “shot either by the Bolsheviks or the Nazis.” William, too, seemed reluctant to speak about this faraway world. Mazower describes as a child overhearing references to strange places like Smolensk, Vilna and Grodno. “I was not sure where they were exactly, or who had lived in them. It had all seemed so far away.”

This is just the beginning. The dramas and tragedies come thick and fast. Mazower’s attention now turns to the family Max and his wife, Frouma, left behind. Both families were scattered. Max had two brothers: Zachar in Vilna, Semyon in Leningrad. “Three brothers and three choices,” writes Mazower, “or better — since choice does not feel quite right — three wagers on fate is how it might seem.” Mazower tracks down Zachar Mazover in the archives at Yad Vashem. He survived the Bolsheviks but not the Nazis.

Frouma’s family suffered terrible losses during the Stalin years, stories of incarceration in Soviet psychiatric prisons, relatives who disappeared in Siberia and were never heard of again. What seemed an ordinary family is anything but. Mazower’s grandfather, Max, may (or may not) have fathered a son, André. The boy’s mother was Sofia Krylenko, a crazy revolutionary whose brother, Nicolai, became People’s Commissar for Justice and Prosecutor General. She also disappeared during the purges.

All kinds of extraordinary people pass through the book. Walter Benjamin meets the Krylenkos in 1920s Moscow, T.S. Eliot corresponds with Sofia’s son, André, in 1930s London, Ernest Gellner and Thomas Balogh appear at Balliol in the 1940s. Beria and Jan Karski pop up. So do Trotsky’s sister, Vyshinksy and the Futurist poet Marinetti. Emma Goldman has dinner with the Mazowers in north London and one of Frouma’s sisters, a Soviet doctor, treats Field Marshal Paulus, who surrendered to the Red Army at Stalingrad.

The story of a family over two generations becomes embedded in the history of the 20th century, full of famous historical figures. Mazower does a superb job of putting each episode in its historical context.  This is historical story-telling at its very best.

The book is full of family secrets and revelations, ghosts from the past and relatives desperately trying to stay in touch, whether from occupied France or Stalin’s Soviet Union. Mazower constantly reminds us of the power of history to turn lives upside down, or worse, to be some kind of terrible meat-grinder which destroys countless families. In 1916 Nicolai Krylenko was arrested as a draft dodger. By late 1917, he was the commander in chief of the Russian armed forces. Twenty years later the Bolshevik who was once Lenin’s chess partner becomes one of Stalin’s victims, just like his sister.

Best of all, Mazower is brilliant at evoking very different places, whether it’s the revolutionary world of 1900s Vilna or peaceful London. He is a master of the telling phrase or the perfect detail. Max and Frouma’s first home in London was in South Hill Park, Hampstead, where Mazower’s father was born in 1925. As soon as he discovers the address, Mazower realises that “it was in the middle of a web of other places with some powerful associations of their own for me”. It’s where Ruth Ellis shot her lover, just yards from where Eric Hobsbawm used to live, surrounded by bookshelves “on which the fundamental texts of Marxism-Leninism shared space with Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici and worn Everyman Classics”.

At the heart of Mazower’s book is the idea of home. His father seemed so at home in a few square miles of north London. And yet it is also a story of displacement and loss, as countless relatives are driven from their homes by history and circumstance. How do people who have known such loss — a brother killed in a Jewish ghetto, a lover locked away in a Soviet psychiatric prison — make a home, build a life, hundreds or thousands of miles away, in north London’s peaceful suburbs?

The book ends, as it began, in north London, after so many detours via the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the Stalinist Terror, the Eastern Front and Vichy France. Like East West Street by Philippe Sands, it is an extraordinary story about ordinary people. There is perhaps one last twist that Mazower doesn’t mention. He now lives 3,000 miles from north London, on New York’s Upper West Side where he teaches at Columbia University. Perhaps this adds to the book’s sense of melancholy. Home is always far away. Family can be unendurably distant.

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Bomberg, a new exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, marks the 60th anniversary of Bomberg’s death. The show runs until February, and then tours to the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, and the Ben Uri Gallery, London, during 2018. Curated by Rachel Dickson and Sarah MacDougall, two leading champions of Jewish and refugee art, this major exhibition offers a chance to reassess Bomberg’s career.

Born in Birmingham in 1890, Bomberg was the seventh of 11 children of a Polish-Jewish immigrant leatherworker, Abraham and his wife Rebecca. In 1895 the family moved to the East End. Bomberg later studied with Walter Sickert and then became part of that “golden generation” at the Slade on the eve of the First World War, which included “The Whitechapel Boys”, a remarkable group of young Jewish artists, among them Mark Gertler, Isaac Rosenberg and Jacob Kramer. All were Yiddish-speaking sons of immigrants from the Russian Pale.

“The Whitechapel Boys” were an extraordinary group. “In all cases,” wrote the critic John Russell Taylor, “the use of Jewish material coincides with the artists’ most experimental phase.” They had one foot in the old country and another in the new world of Edwardian London, tradition with a twist of Modernism.

Art historians tend to speak of Bomberg’s career in terms of artistic movements and form: his early relationship with Cubism and Vorticism, then a more figurative style in the 1920s, as he moved towards landscape and portraits, with a growing emphasis on colour and pigment rather than geometric form.

However, there is another way of looking at Bomberg’s career. He was always an outsider. He studied at the Slade but he was also a product of the Jewish East End. From the 1920s he spent much of his life living abroad: four years in Palestine, long periods in Spain, six months in the Soviet Union, time in Cyprus. He was attracted by the Mediterranean sun and landscape, but these places were also cheap for a poor artist.  

In between these trips Bomberg returned to Britain, where he faced neglect and poverty. When he applied to work as a war artist he was turned down twice. His last one-man show in London was in 1943. He taught at the Borough Polytechnic after the war, where his pupils included Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, but only because the more prestigious art schools rejected him. He has been described as “the most brutally excluded artist in Britain”.

David Bomberg, Ghetto Theatre, 1920, Ben Uri Collection © Ben Uri Gallery and Museum
Recognition came posthumously. The Arts Council held a Memorial Exhibition in 1958, there was a retrospective at the Tate in 1967, a major exhibition at the Whitechapel curated by Nicholas Serota in 1979 and at the Tate in 1988, curated by Richard Cork, and now this astonishing exhibition at Pallant House in collaboration with the Ben Uri.

Of course, art historians are right to talk of form and artistic movements. And some of the best critics, from John Berger and David Sylvester in the 1950s to Richard Cork today, greatly admired Bomberg. But we shouldn’t forget the neglect and poverty. This exhibition, full of major works covering more than 40 years, should make us ask why such a great artist didn’t receive the recognition he deserved in his lifetime.

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On September 29 (coincidentally the night of Kol Nidre) a revival of the anti-Israel play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, opens at the Young Vic. First performed at the Royal Court in 2005, it tells the story of Corrie, a young American activist working for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), who was killed trying to block an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bulldozer conducting military operations in the Gaza Strip in 2003. Her family lost a wrongful death appeal in the Israeli Supreme Court in 2015.

Corrie’s emails and diaries were the basis for the play, edited by Katharine Viner, now editor of the Guardian, and Alan Rickman, and directed by Rickman at the Royal Court. Reviews divided on clear political lines. The Guardian wrote: “The danger of right-on propaganda is avoided by the specificity of Rickman’s Theatre Upstairs production. Above all, this is a portrait of a woman . . .”  By contrast, The Times argued that “an element of unvarnished propaganda comes to the fore. With no attempt made to set the violence in context, we are left with the impression of unarmed civilians being crushed by faceless militarists.”

This month’s revival has been condemned by Jewish organisations who have called the play “unapologetically anti-Israel” and “an opportunity to fan the flames of hatred”.

More disturbing, however, is the larger picture of anti-Israel bias in British theatre. Over the past 20 years there have been a number of plays attacking Israel: My Name is Rachel Corrie, Alive from Palestine: Stories Under the Occupation, one of David Lan’s first productions at the Young Vic in 2002, David Hare’s Via Dolorosa and Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza (both at the Royal Court). In 2014 the Tricycle Theatre refused to host the UK Jewish Film Festival because it received funding from the Israeli embassy. The Tricycle was supported by Nicholas Hytner, then director of the National Theatre. In addition, Harold Pinter, Michael Kustow and Arnold Wesker all became vocal critics of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Along with Churchill and Hare, these were major figures in British theatre and the Court; the Young Vic and the Tricycle are prominent theatres. At Edinburgh this summer, Jackie Walker, a left-wing activist suspended from Labour over accusations of anti-Semitism, had a one-woman show, The Lynching, which included predictable attacks on Israel. A banner draped in front of the audience read: “Anti-Semitism is a crime. Anti-Zionism is a duty.”

Where are the pro-Israel plays? More important, where are British plays which treat this conflict in an even-handed way or which create interesting Israeli characters?

This month’s other play about Israel is Oslo, at the National Theatre, on the talks that led to the Oslo agreements in the 1990s. It is by an American playwright, J.T. Rogers, and is transferring from Broadway. It was hailed by the New York Times for featuring “a vast cast of characters, of widely varied temperaments and ideological stripes”. It is inconceivable that it would have been commissioned by a British theatre or written by a well-known British playwright. Why? Because the cultural Left has been consistently critical of Israel for more than 30 years, singling it out for unique opprobrium. 

The other contrast is with television drama. In recent years there have been acclaimed drama series about the Middle East, above all, Homeland and Hugo Blick’s The Honourable Woman, where the emphasis has been on complexity and ambiguity, with unforgettable Israeli and Arab characters. Why have even-handed TV dramas on Israel been possible, when British theatre can only produce shrill agitprop? The answer, sadly, is that British theatres think it is better to be self-righteous than carefully to explore both sides of complex conflicts.

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Other winners and losers, however, tell a more revealing story. The best interviews were those which quietly sought information not the shouters. Nick Ferrari’s interview with Diane Abbott on LBC, Emma Barnett’s interview with Jeremy Corbyn on Woman’s Hour and Andrew Neil’s interviews with just about everyone sought policy detail while Paxman and John Humphrys huffed and puffed and got nowhere.

There was a fascinating divide between our broadcasters and a few lonely voices in the press and on social media over their coverage of Corbyn. TV and radio pretended that Labour under Corbyn was just another mainstream political party. It isn’t. You had to go to a handful of journalists for another perspective: Corbyn’s support for terrorist organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah and his failure to deal with the stench of anti-Semitism under his leadership. This was not politics as usual. Journalists like Daniel Finkelstein, Stephen Pollard and Guido Fawkes spelt it out. Take the May Day rally addressed by John McDonnell. He spoke to a crowd carrying Hamas and pro-Assad flags and large pictures of Stalin. The main news organisations, the BBC and ITN, didn’t report this properly. Why not?

The BBC had a bad election campaign following its biased coverage of the US election and President Trump’s inauguration. The audience at the Cambridge TV debate was partisan. The BBC was, too often, soft on Corbyn and McDonnell. It did not spend enough time analysing Labour’s wild, uncosted spending promises, often leaving it to Paul Johnson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies to expose the reality. In an article called “The age of lies: how politicians hide behind statistics”, Mark Damazer, former Controller of Radio 4, was surely right to call for more fact-checking by the media and for putting statistics in context. After the EU referendum and the 2017 election the media shouldn’t allow politicians to play games with economic figures.

The coverage of the so-called “dementia tax” was exaggerated, as anyone who has had to pay for the care of a parent with dementia will know. The crisis in social care is serious and should never have been turned into a pantomime. The same applies to national security after three recent terrorist attacks, and the debate after the Grenfell Tower fire has already become personal and emotional. These problems are systemic in broadcasting. The mainstream media are obsessed with personalities and human interest stories. The main lesson of the election is that we need an urgent review of our political coverage, and of the BBC in particular.  

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