WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Visionary guides in times of violence
What better guide for our times, say FIONA O’CONNOR than the example of remarkable women who thought through the experience of WWII
HORROR IN GAZA: Palestinians pray over a mass grave, in Khan Younis, of the bodies of their dead brought from Shifa hospital last Wednesday. Hannah Arendt foresaw these outcomes and was furious at the Zionist movement’s 1942 resolutions to model an ethnically homogeneous Jewish nation-state in Israel
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
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
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Salvation of Philosophy
Wolfram Eilenberger, Allen Lane, £25
COMING in this time of war The Visionaries offers insights into the human capacity to think through violence.
Remarkable women caught up in the second world war totalitarian machine: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil are Jewish women fleeing the Gestapo; French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir is trapped in Vichy France. These women’s experiences are captured in this group biography along with radical ideas that shaped a century, born from painful comprehension of human atrocity.
And somehow (bestseller) Ayn Rand gets in the mix; a Russian-Jewish refugee from Stalinism, her writing is shamefully exposed for its inadequacy when read next to the others.
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