‘A dandy aesthete with visions of sacrificial violence’

Eschewing the biblical advertising of ‘the promised land’ or indeed ‘a land of milk and honey’, the Conservative colonial secretary William Ormsby-Gore presented a far grislier picture of Palestine on the eve of the second world war when he described it as ‘full of arms and bitterness, and there are few who do good and many that do evil’. That précis is proved sadly accurate many times over in Patrick Bishop’s gripping The Reckoning, about the fatal shooting and subsequent martyrdom of the Zionist freedom fighter (or terrorist — take your pick), Avraham Stern.

As characters go Stern is compelling in a car-crash kind of way. Bishop — a former Middle East correspondent for the Telegraph who now writes engrossing 20th-century histories — sums him up quite marvellously as ‘a dandy aesthete with visions of sacrificial violence’.