This has been a year of ghosts. At home, history returned to haunt British politics, with David Cameron recalled to government (why hello, ghost of Christmas past) and the Covid inquiry summoning Boris Johnson’s period of rule (more like ghosts of Christmas parties). Abroad, the threat of a Trump comeback hangs over the US, while in Israel and Gaza an age-old conflict has been tragically revived.
It’s a fitting year, then, for writers using history to make sense of the present and none do so more movingly than the journalist and Conservative peer Danny Finkelstein in Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad (William Collins), an immigrant family’s story of love and war, but above all, a passionate defence of moderate liberal values as a bulwark against violent extremes. His mother was a German Jew who miraculously survived a Nazi concentration camp; his father a Jew from Lvov in Poland (now Lviv in Ukraine), shipped off by the invading Russians to one of Stalin’s gulags. The deliberately ordinary suburban life they eventually forged in Britain, after meeting and marrying, was an extraordinary victory over the odds, a reminder never to make assumptions about what lies behind unassuming front doors or underestimate the privilege of a quiet life. The three children of this marriage were understandably raised to believe in the importance of politics, which had meant literally life and death to their parents, but also to stand “for moderation against extremism. For reason over irrationality. For optimism and resilience, tempered by the memory of dictatorship and oppression but never overwhelmed by it,” Finkelstein writes.
