Descent into hell

In my work as a reviewer, a small, steady proportion of all the books publishers send me concern the Holocaust. With middle age has come a curious foreshortening of my perspective on modern history so that, paradoxically, the Nazis’ inhumanity has begun to seem less distant in time and, therefore, more horrible still. Fortunately I can reassure myself that, objectively, it happened long ago and that even the atrocities of eastern Europe and Rwanda are now a couple of decades safely in the past.

Such consolations vanish when confronted by The Raqqa Diaries, which is shockingly of the present. It is a terrible reminder that we are unwise to impute any kind of teleology to history. Raqqa is the capital of the so-called Islamic State and this is a portrait of daily life there by the pseudonymous author. He smuggled it out at the risk of beheading and it was first broadcast on Radio 4’s Today programme.