The courage of their convictions

HHhH is a prize-winning French novel about a writer writing a novel about the plot to kill the Gestapo boss Reinhard Heydrich. A lot of people reckon it’s a big deal — Martin Amis, Mario Vargas Llosa, me — so naturally there’s a backlash afoot. In a fit of territorial pissing disguised as an interview, Michael Burleigh revealed that Laurent Binet ‘does not even read German’ (which HHhH admits on page 28) and professed surprise that his research failed to take in a Heydrich biography published (as Burleigh didn’t say) almost two years after HHhH first came out.

Most popular

Michael Gove

‘I’m a new kind of Christian’: Jordan Peterson on faith, family and the future of the right

I suppose part of the problem is that Binet asks for trouble with clever-dick lines like this one: ‘This scene is not really useful, and on top of that I practically made it up.