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☆ The Hostage Deal Means Israel Is Fighting the Clock
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-24 | by ( Dominic Green | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

Wonder Land: Hamas knew that after Oct. 7 the narrative would shift to the isolation of Israel. Images: Zuma Press/AFP/Getty Images Composite: Mark KellyWith a four-day cease-fire reportedly going into effect Friday, time isn’t on Israel’s side in its war with Hamas in Gaza. Israeli society, already riven by political infighting, is traumatized by Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault and divided over how to handle the hostage crisis. Further cease-fires mean the recovery of more hostages, but this will slow and eventually halt Israel’s effort to break Hamas’s control over Gaza. That would be a strategic defeat for both Israel and the U.S.Israel needs time to root out Hamas.

Persons: Mark Kelly, Hamas’s, Biden Organizations: Zuma Press, Getty Locations: Israel, Gaza, U.S, Iraq, Syria, Iran, China

☆ Middle East War Becomes a European Crisis
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-02 | by ( Dominic Green | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Images: AFP/Getty Images/Zuma Press Composite: Mark KellyLondonA war in the Middle East is a foreign-policy crisis for the U.S., but it is a domestic crisis for Europe. The streets of London, Paris and Berlin are blocked by marchers calling for jihad. In Brussels, the European Union’s capital, an international soccer match was halted after a Tunisian asylum seeker shot two Swedish fans on their way to the game. Synagogues and Jewish schools are vandalized, and Jews physically assaulted. Police are outnumbered in the streets, undermined by legal activists, and supported only equivocally by politicians.

Persons: Mark Kelly London Organizations: Getty, Police Locations: Europe, London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels

☆ ‘The Secret Life of John Le Carré’ Review: Operations in the Field
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-27 | by ( Dominic Green | Adam Sisman | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

The author David Cornwell (whose pen name was John le Carré) shark-fishing near his home in Cornwall, England, August 1974. Photo: Ben Martin/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty ImagesWhen John le Carré contemplated writing an autobiography, he hired two detectives to investigate his life. Grab a Copy The Secret Life of John le Carre By Adam Sisman Harper 208 pages We may earn a commission when you buy products through the links on our site. Buy Book Amazon Barnes & Noble Books a Million Bookshop“The Secret Life of John le Carré” is the last word, an enlightening appendix to Mr. Sisman’s “John le Carré: The Biography” (2015). Though le Carré was “apparently open” in their interviews, Mr. Sisman “quickly learned not to rely on anything he said.” Le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, was “a performer,” a method novelist.

Persons: David Cornwell, John le, Ben Martin, John le Carré, “, ”, Adam Sisman, John le Carre, Adam Sisman Harper, Barnes, Sisman’s, Mr, Sisman, Sisman “, ” Le Carré Organizations: Noble Locations: Cornwall, England

☆ ‘New Makers of Modern Strategy’ Review: Waging War, Making Peace
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-12 | by ( Dominic Green | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Photo: Getty Images/Tetra images RFA group of generals is called a “glitter”; a group of historians an “argumentation.” There is no colorful group noun for academic analysts of strategy. Perhaps, like owls, they form a “college.” In “The New Makers of Modern Strategy,” Hal Brands, a professor of strategy at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, gathers a college of 45 such experts. All are wise after the facts of their field, and each attempts the historian’s equivalent of the owl’s neck rotation—a sweep that, taking in past and present, looks to the future.

Persons: Hal Brands Organizations: ”, Johns Hopkins University’s School, International Studies

☆ ‘Orwell’ Review: Champion of an Ordinary Truth
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-19 | by ( Dominic Green | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

George Orwell in an undated photograph. Photo: Estate of Vernon RichardsGeorge Orwell, the inventor of the Ministry of Love and Room 101 in “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” was married for the second time in Room 65 of University College Hospital in London. His sickbed was not far from Senate House, the building that had inspired the Ministry of Truth. The groom was dying of tuberculosis and wore a crimson corduroy jacket. One hundred days later, on Jan. 21, 1950, Orwell was dead, aged 46.

☆ ‘Wanderlust’ Review: A Giant of Polar Adventure
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-10 | by ( Dominic Green | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

The age of European exploration was also the age of empires. When wild-bearded white men committed bold acts of derring-do on the margins of the map, they smoothed the path for the machinery of commerce and government. Reid Mitenbuler’s “Wanderlust” is a detailed, digressive and frequently fascinating biography of the Danish polymath Peter Freuchen (1886-1957), a man who explored Earth’s second-last and second-coldest frontier, the Arctic. In 1906, Freuchen, a 20-year-old medical student at the University of Copenhagen, enlisted in an expedition to Greenland as a ship’s stoker. Freuchen’s mother, Frederikke, the daughter of the Paraguayan renegade, approved of her son’s endeavor and wrote that he was “doing the right thing” by following his “restlessness and spirit of adventure.”

☆ Prince Harry’s Pagan Progress
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-20 | by ( Dominic Green | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

Prince Harry ’s memoir, “Spare,” is among other things a spiritual autobiography—a New Age story of suffering and rebirth. Harry has said he’s “not religious,” but he is spiritual. Christianity leaves him cold, but he pursues enlightenment with a zeal that would have warmed the heart of a Puritan divine. He travels this path alone, guided by drugs, spirit animals sent by his late mother, Diana, and daily yoga and meditation. Yet the percentage of millennials claiming “absolute certainty” in God’s existence (53%) wasn’t far off the figures for baby boomers (59%) and Generation X (55%) when they were young.

☆ ‘The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England’ Review: Crafting a Dynasty’s Enduring Image
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-12 | by ( Dominic Green | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

New YorkThe Tudor dynasty was short in duration, but it has become perennial in memory. Just over a century passed between 1485, when Henry Tudor became Henry VII , and 1603, when his granddaughter Elizabeth I died childless, ceding England’s throne to the Stuart dynasty in the form of her Scottish cousin James. Yet the Tudor century remade English politics, religion and art, from the Reformation to “Wolf Hall.” “The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England,” now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a focused, cool and refreshing study in the imagery of power.

☆ Boris Johnson May Be the Last Best Hope of the Tories
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-23 | by ( Dominic Green | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

The resignation of Liz Truss after only 45 days in office and even fewer in power means that by next Friday, Britain will have had three prime ministers in a single year for the first time since 1827. This rapid turnover at the top has happened before in Britain through the sudden death of the incumbent (George Canning in 1827, Andrew Bonar Law in 1922). It would be even more remarkable if two of this year’s three prime ministers were to be the same person: Boris Johnson. Political parties in the modern sense barely existed in Lord North’s day; there were only factions. And there isn’t much of a Conservative Party now, only factions.

☆ ‘Madly, Deeply’ Review: The Cul-de-Sac of Stardom
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-21 | by ( Dominic Green | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

Performance heightens the impression of individuality, but when actors are offstage, they show little variation of character, and less depth. English actors notoriously devolve into the genus known as “luvvies,” for their insistent exploitation of the word that they know everyone wants to hear. Alan Rickman, who died of cancer in 2016, was one of the leading luvvies of his generation. His biography is typical of British male stars, a two-act drama that begins in theater and ends in the movies. Act II is payback: the movies.

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