Fiona MacCarthy looks back on the last debutantes' 'Season', in 1958. By Joseph Mahon.

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Last Curtsey: The End of the Debutantes by Fiona MacCarthy. Faber and Faber, 2006.

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Are the rich very different to the rest of us, or is it just that - as Hemingway insisted – that they have lots more money?

A persuasive answer to this question is that the rich are very different because they are socially constructed to be very different. Literary and social biographies such as Humphrey Carpenter's The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and his Friends (1989), and Paula Byrne's Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (2009), give a compelling insight into the construction of class during the inter-war years, while Polly Toynbee's "Inherit and be damned" (Guardian, 5 April, 1988) paints a salutary tale of the burdens of class during the 1980s. For a truly poignant account of the felicities and horizons of class in the post-war era, however, it would be hard to surpass Fiona MacCarthy's widely reviewed Last Curtsey: The End of the Debutantes.

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Greg Philo and Mike Berry expand on their work in Bad News from Israel in a follow-up book, and uncover the ideological biases at work in coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict. By Ronan MacDubhghaill.

Following on from the successes of the widely acclaimed “Bad News From Israel”, “More Bad News From Israel” sheds light on an important topic which is so easily misunderstood. In so doing, the authors expand on the work carried out in the first edition to include a detailed analysis of the coverage of the Israeli attacks on the Gaza strip in December 2008 and January 2009, as well as on the Gaza flotilla in 2010. An in-depth thematic analysis of the coverage of the conflict is carried out, with the intention of uncovering the underlying ideological biases at work regarding how the conflict is reported in the West. Not only does this include a scrupulously detailed account of the coverage itself in the form of a discourse analysis, but the new book also presents new and original quantitative and qualitative research. The quantitative component of this research includes questionnaires used in the UK, US and Germany, which are informed by and interpreted with reference to a highly instructive set of qualitative research. Vitally, this qualitative component involves interaction between veteran journalists and members of the public in the setting of focus groups, which lends real illustrative texture to the study, bringing sharply into focus the discrepancies through which the dynamics of the conflict are misunderstood.

 

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Peter Singer deals with the controversial subjects of abortion, euthanasia and infanticide, amongst others, in a revised and updated edition of his classic 1980 text Practical Ethics. Review by Joseph Mahon.

Peter Singer is Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. In 1993, together with Paula Cavalieri, an Italian philosopher and animal advocate, he founded the Great Ape Project. Its aim was to “grant some basic rights to non-human great apes: life, liberty and the prohibition of torture.”¹ Singer is also the author of more than forty books, including Animal Liberation (1975), Rethinking Life and Death (1996) and, more recently, The Life You Can Save (2009). In 2005, he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

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T.E. Lawrence is brought magnificently to life in a new biography by Michael Korda. By Lorraine Courtney.

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Peter O’Toole immortalised him as an enigma wrapped in Arab robes, galloping on a camel across the desert plains in David Lean’s epic film. Documentaries and no less than 56 biographies launched a thousand myths. But they still haven’t answered the question asked by one of Lawrence of Arabia’s many exasperated commanding officers, “Who is this extraordinary pipsqueak?”

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Eric Hobsbawm is summarily dismissive of social democracy in How to Change the World, writes Joseph Mahon

The claim that the Marxist classics offer no clear picture of communist society, or set of policies for that society, is a seductive one if you wish to distance Marx and Engels from Lenin, and from what Kolakowski and Judt call “the totalitarian outcome”. The founding fathers neither envisaged, nor advocated, such an outcome since they specified no outcome whatever, so they cannot be held responsible for the totalitarian one.

The totalitarian state was exclusively the work of Lenin, Stalin and their executioners. On the downside, this wasn’t the way that Lenin read the Marxist classics, especially not in his masterwork The State and Revolution. Be that as it may, if it is the case that Marx and Engels did not formulate a political project, then classical Marxism has nothing to say, and nothing to contribute to contemporary political debate. This is a depressing and scarcely believable inference; but in any event, it is not true.

 

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Joseph Mahon reviews Henning Mankell's final Wallander novel, The Troubled Man.

Simone de Beauvoir's mother, though dying of stomach cancer, had "a very easy death."

By contrast, Kurt Wallander, the introspective police detective in Henning Mankell's The Troubled Man, has a horrible, protracted death. The abrupt, penultimate paragraph of the novel informs us that "The shadow grew more intense. And Kurt Wallander slowly descended into a darkness that some years later transported him into the empty universe known as Alzheimer's disease."

 

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Human virtue was absent, and the only creatures he truly loved were his dogs: Lorraine Courtney discovers that Otto von Bismarck was an appalling human being.

He might have created modern Germany, but he was a deeply flawed man. That Bismarck was a political maverick is indisputable: in his 28 years in power (between 1862 and 1890), he turned the relatively minor power of Prussia into a new German Reich that dominated Europe. Bismarck's staying power involved use of the full gamut of political tricks, from repression and divide-and-rule to rainbow coalitions and appeals to national security.

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A notable feature of election 2011 was the fate of numerous Irish political dynasties - Lemass-Haughey, Hanafin, Andrews, the narrow escape for the Lenihan and Cowen names. Owen O’Shea’s new book, Heirs to the Kingdom, examines how a handful of families have kept control of political power in Kerry since the War of Independence, and asks if this really serves the interest of the Irish people. Edward O'Hare has read it.

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