MAYER WAKEFIELD applauds Rosamund Pike’s punchy and tragic portrayal of a multi-tasking mother and high court judge
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Stone-cold truths
MICHAL BONCZA recommends a salutary new book on the Palestinians whose skills built the zionist state
FIONA O CONNOR recommends an unflinching depiction of child sexual abuse and its aftershocks, set in a working-class Liverpool family
New releases from Paul Weller, Wet Leg, and Dino Saluzzi
PAUL DONOVAN relishes the spectacle of a 1950s detective in pursuit of a 500-year-old murder mystery
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel
by Andre Ross
(Verso, £16.99)
THERE’S a millennial tradition of stonemasonry that evolved around the world’s best-quality dolomitic limestone and its Palestinian practitioners are renowned across the whole of the Middle East for their skills. They’ve built virtually every state in the region except, of course, their own.
As the blurb to Andre Ross’s book points out, the stonemasons have been used to build the state of Israel and, in the process, construct “facts on the ground.” There “they demolish our houses while we build theirs,” is how a Palestinian stonemason, waiting at a checkpoint in Jerusalem, describes his experience to Andrew Ross in this book.
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Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
New releases from Hannah Rose Platt, Kemp Harris, and Spear Of Destiny
MICHAL BONCZA recommends a compact volume that charts the art of propagating ideas across the 20th century
