Books | Jonathan Freedland

Rutger Bregman: ‘Our secret superpower is our ability to cooperate’

The historian offers a hopeful view of human nature in his latest book, Humankind. It couldn’t have come at a better time

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months

For most authors, now is the very worst time to bring out a book. The shops are closed; the festival circuit has migrated to Zoom; there’s a plague to compete with. But for Rutger Bregman, this might just be the perfect moment to publish Humankind, a sweeping survey of human existence which argues that, despite all our obvious flaws, most people are basically good.

A book whose subtitle is “A Hopeful History” should be welcome at a time when people are gagging for cheering news. It fits the mood too, appearing just as neighbours are helping neighbours, people are clapping for carers, and humans the world over are cooperating to save each other’s lives. What’s more, as some are talking of a radical fresh start once we emerge from this crisis, a 1945-style new settlement, Humankind offers a roadmap for how we might organise ourselves very differently.

Did the people of Easter Island really turn on each other and descend into cannibalism? The evidence suggests otherwise

When all those books were being published by famous atheist writers like Dawkins and Harris, I was like: 'This is clearly wrong'

For the Record: David Cameron’s memoir is honest but still wrong

The former prime minister gives a truthful account of errors – but unknowingly makes a few more

For the Record by David Cameron, William Collins, £25

A spectre haunts this book – the spectre of Europe. Just as the 700 pages of Tony Blair’s autobiography could not escape the shadow of Iraq, so the 700 pages of David Cameron’s memoir are destined to be read through a single lens: Brexit.

Address Unknown: the great, forgotten anti-Nazi book everyone must read

First published in 1938, US author Kathrine Kressmann Taylor’s forgotten classic is a devastating work of political fiction that still resonates today

Some of the largest themes have been addressed in the shortest books. That is especially true in the realm of what might be called political fiction. The single best evocation of communism – and especially the distance between the ideal and the Soviet reality – remains George Orwell’s brief allegory, Animal Farm. In the same way, few works have conveyed the brutal nature of imperialism more effectively than Joseph Conrad managed in fewer than a hundred pages in Heart of Darkness. A third place in that small space on the shelf could be allocated to an even briefer work: Address Unknown, a story so short it can be read on a morning bus ride. Yet somehow it distils the essence of the ideology that, along with the other two, casts a deathly shadow over the 20th century. Across a few economic pages it touches the heart of the Nazi darkness.

Address Unknown was first published in Story magazine in September 1938, and then in book form a year later, becoming an instant bestseller. It has been translated across the world, adapted into a 1944 film and into multiple productions for the stage and radio – all under the name of Kressmann Taylor, after Story’s editor, along with Kathrine Kressmann Taylor’s husband, Elliott, decided it was “too strong to appear under the name of a woman”. The impact was immediate, the story credited with having “jolted America”, alerting it to the horror unfolding in Nazi Germany.

The story traces the contours of fascism – the leader-worship, the surveillance, the summons to men to act as men

Anti-vaxxers, the Momo challenge … why lies spread faster than facts

With Trump making six false claims a day and bogus Brexit claims spreading, we live in a disorienting post-truth era. It all began with the David Irving trial, writes Jonathan Freedland

The queasiness keeps coming back, a very specific malady that I thought I’d put behind me nearly 20 years ago. But each time I read about, say, the bogus version of the Lisbon treaty that’s gone viral, or the “malicious hoax” of the Momo challenge, or the rise and rise of the anti-vaxxer movement, the symptoms return, stronger than ever.

If asked by a doctor to describe the sensation, I’d say it feels as if the ground beneath my feet is slipping away, that there is nothing firm or solid to stand on. What triggers it are lies, usually in the public sphere, told by those with power and authority. And it’s not just any old lie, but rather the lie that is smirkingly cavalier in its disregard for the difference between truth and falsehood, that suggests you can never really tell the difference between the two and that it doesn’t matter anyway.

Irving was saying we can’t trust anything – not even thousands of witnesses. Where did that leave what we call history?

The talented Dan Mallory affair: is this high noon for the privileged white male?

The exposure of a novelist’s ‘dissembling’ could spell trouble for unreliable narrators everywhere

There’s a new work that has the publishing world gripped, with editors in London and New York confessing themselves hooked. It races along like a thriller, with several dizzying twists and turns and a compelling central character. What’s more, this sensational story is not fiction but a detailed, well-sourced work of journalism.

I’m referring to the New Yorker’s 12,000-word profile of Dan Mallory, whose debut novel, The Woman in the Window, published under the pseudonym AJ Finn, has been a monster hit. The report makes an unsettling read, charting what the magazine calls the “trail of deceptions” left by Mallory, including claims that he has endured and survived cancer in various forms – with tumours in both his brain and spine – that his parents were dead, and that his brother took his own life.

Amos Oz: the novelist prophet who never lost hope for Israel

To critics at home, Oz was a bleeding-heart liberal – but to audiences around the world he was a literary giant, steadfast in his belief for a two-state solution

On Friday afternoon, a text arrived from Israel letting me know of the death of Amos Oz, hailed for decades as that country’s greatest novelist. “The last, best voice of an Israel that is all but gone,” it read.

Oz himself would doubtless have found a way to wave aside such talk, dismissing it as melodramatic. But there’s truth in it. For he was indeed the embodiment of a particular Israel, one that dominated in the first years of the state’s life but which has steadily receded to the margins.

Related: Amos Oz obituary

Amos Oz: the novelist prophet who never lost hope for Israel

To critics at home, Oz was a bleeding-heart liberal – but to audiences around the world he was a literary giant, steadfast in his belief for a two-state solution

Related: Amos Oz obituary

If you were in the White House, how would you tackle Trump?

This week’s revelations show many around the president have deep fears about his state of mind – but deciding how to act for the best poses a real dilemma

A new and unhinged American president orders a pre-emptive nuclear strike against North Korea. The senior officials who surround him are terrified, desperate to thwart his will, resorting to subterfuge to prevent the man they serve from wreaking havoc. They are the resistance from within. Two of them have a hushed conversation about the 25th amendment of the US constitution, which allows for a president to be declared incapacitated. When that road is blocked, they contemplate an even more drastic solution …

That was the starting point of the novel whose manuscript I delivered in January 2017, two days after Donald Trump had sworn the oath of office. The book, To Kill the President, was published last year last year under the pseudonym Sam Bourne. When I wrote it, none of us knew for sure what the Trump presidency would look like. But this week, Washington Post legend Bob Woodward published Fear, based on detailed interviews with Trump insiders. Among other things, the book describes “repeated episodes of anxiety inside the government over Trump’s handling of the North Korean nuclear threat. One month into his presidency, Trump asked [the head of the US military] for a plan for a pre-emptive military strike on North Korea.”

‘If you become convinced the leader you serve is a danger to your country, where does your patriotic and democratic duty lie?'

If you were in the White House, how would you tackle Trump?

This week’s revelations show many around the president have deep fears about his state of mind – but deciding how to act for the best poses a real dilemma

‘If you become convinced the leader you serve is a danger to your country, where does your patriotic and democratic duty lie?'

Philip Roth: explorer of a golden age’s dark corners

Roth’s work evokes the sense of endless opportunity postwar America seemed to promise

The legend of Philip Roth had become so great, it was almost a shock to be reminded that he was, until Tuesday, still a living writer. He had become part of the Mount Rushmore of American letters, hailed by the New York Times as “the last of the great white males”, his place secure alongside Saul Bellow and John Updike, themselves both long gone, as one of the towering figures of 20th-century American literature.

He had won every accolade, bar the Nobel, and in 2005 the Library of America announced it would publish Roth’s works, lifting him into a pantheon that included the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Walt Whitman, only the third writer ever to receive that honour while still drawing breath. Roth was of such an elevated stature that in dying, he seemed to be joining his peers.

Related: Philip Roth obituary

Portnoy's Complaint (1969)