Don’t mention the war

It wasn’t easy being the daughter of the artist Avigdor Arikha. In this memoir, Alba Arikha mixes teenage fury with glimpses of her godfather Samuel Beckett and a fragmented account of her father’s experiences of the Holocaust. Avigdor Arikha and his wife, the poet Anne Atik, surrounded themselves with the intelligentsia of Paris and drove their daughter mad: ‘I resent their purity and knowledge. Their values and morals. My father’s anger. My mother’s goodness.’

Avigdor Arikha was an irascible, dismissive and earnestly didactic father. Alba paid no attention when he tried to teach her about the Sumerians; she would not stay quiet when he discussed art and politics with his friends; when she began improvising on the piano, it was the wrong type of music.

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Ross Clark

Britain is living beyond its means

The book is a rapid series of vignettes that move from Paris to Jerusalem to London and New York.