In the Literary Review (February), David Cesarani claims that The Patagonian Hare reads "like an exercise in Gallic rodomontade". Is it unfair to see this as a displacement sideways on to "the French" of the apprehension, common among English Jews, that one of our people is shouting the odds, as well as blowing his own trumpet and paddling his own canoe with a vigour that just might make waves for bien-pensant trimmers? 

In his early book, Justice Delayed, and in the recent Major Farran's Hat, Cesarani has been diligent in researching British reluctance to prosecute outrages against Jews, but he does it in plodding prose which acquits him of any charge of uncomely indignation or (key phrase) self-importance. The English Jew may sigh, but he never points. It is not surprising that the first man in England to write at length about the Holocaust, in 1943, was not the worthy All Souls pundit Isaiah Berlin, but the arriviste Arthur Koestler, in Cyril Connolly's Horizon. Nor is it uncharacteristic that Cesarani deplored the egotistical Koestler's sexual predations in his 1998 biography, The Homeless Mind. In much the same head-magisterial spirit, he winces at Lanzmann's shameless delight in erotic activity, although modesty forbids any mention of Lanzmann's dismay at Le Castor's disclosure, when he first shacked up with her, that he had six current rivals for her favours. They still order these things differently in France.

It may be true that France is systematically anti-Semitic, as David Pryce-Jones has argued, in Betrayal: France, the Arabs and the Jews, but French Jews have learnt that reticence and decorum procure neither respect nor security. The Patagonian Hare pulls no punches and does not fail to land a few blows on the reputation of Lanzmann's one-time maître-à-penser Sartre, whom he blames, in part, for the suicide of his sister Evelyne.

Cesarani pays tribute, à sa façon, to   Lanzmann's role in the Resistance, but still wonders whether he hopes "to be taken seriously". If Cesarani had a personal history of the same order, or had created a masterpiece of the quality of Shoah, he might have some right to pose that condescending question. He hasn't; and he doesn't.